Since the end of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has shifted the center of its policy and investment in sport. The first decade of the 21st century was defined by investment in Olympic sports (Brownell, 2008; Manzenreiter, 2010), extending the Olympic Strategy first established by the Chinese Sports Ministry in 1995 (Hong and Huang, 2013). However, since the end of the games governmental focus on sport has narrowed to a number of ‘global sports’. At the center of this narrowed investment golf, soccer, and tennis have expanded rapidly alongside a small selection of other sports. With investment in events, media, player development, and facilities they have each come to define a new era in Chinese sports culture._x000D_
This presentation explores the development of tennis in China to consider what has shaped the formation of sport culture in this new post-Beijing 2008 period. Specifically focusing on how tennis feeds into a social class identity, one that services an international and domestic function, providing entry into a global elite society and simultaneously serving as a point of distinction from lower class and largely rural Chinese class identities.