Abstract: From the early 1920s to the mid 1930s, under the influence of American naturalistic sports ideas, girls' school education in China gradually broke through the constraint of single gymnastics teaching by introducing competitive sports such as basketball and track and field. This triggered a series of discourses against women's "vigorous exercise".Using the methods of literature review, historical analysis, and logical reasoning, the paperexamined the discourses against women's "vigorous exercise", finding that the occurrence of such discourses involved the selective translation and creative localization of Western sports physiology knowledge. On the one hand, from the social perspective of national salvation, the objection to women's vigorous exercise was endowed with the eugenic significance that women must exercise moderately to become good procreators for the nation; but from the perspective of traditional cultural etiquette and customs, it entailed the gender political implication that women's body must conform totraditional ethics, and that men and women are different from each other. The discourses against women's "vigorous exercise"thus became a clue to trigger the subtle balance between nationalism and patriarchal politicsin the local context, and made them form what Stuart Hall calls the "articulation" relationship.

Key words: women's "vigorous exercise", nationalism, gender politics, translingual practice, women's sports