Abstract: General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized: "attach importance to history, study history, and learn from history". History is the foundation for a nation to settle down and get on with its pursuit. At the beginning of the 20th century, based on the exploration of the country's development path and the conflict between Chinese and Western cultures, a great cultural debate between "retroversion" and "westernization" arose among the Chinese intellectual elites. Elites in the sports industry also participated. A tit-for-tat debate broke outbetween the "foreign sports" faction who advocated learning from Western sports and the "local sports" faction who advocated inheriting the quintessence of martial arts. In 1917, Mao Zedong participated in the controversy with the article "The Research on Sports", advocating the inclusiveness of Chinese and Western sports culture to serve China under the new situation at the time. This paperinterprets Mao Zedong's "The Research on Sports" against the process of China's modernization, analyzes the concept of the fusion of Chinese and Western sports cultures contained in "The Research on Sports", and explores the historical significance and modern value of Mao Zedong's view of sports in promotingthe process of China's sports modernization.

Key words: MAO Zedong, The Research on Sports, sport culture, cultural conflict, cultural fusion