‘We are living targets, human punching bags’: Misrecognition, invisible labour and identity among sparring partners in Chinese elite sport

Sparring partners in China's whole-nation system ( juguo tizhi ) for elite sport perform bodily labour indispensable to competitive success yet remain at the margins of institutional recognition, occupying a position in which embodied labour is appropriated while its producer accrues neither reward nor visibility. Situating this predicament within debates on labour exploitation, alienation and the culture of risk in sport, and drawing on Honneth's recognition theory supplemented by Bourdieu's bodily capital and Foucault's disciplined body, the study analyses life-history interviews with 12 current and former sparring partners from three provinces and four sports. The findings reveal threefold disrespect: instrumental erosion of the body dissolves self-trust; bureaucratic exclusion damages self-respect and systematic concealment of contributions corrodes self-esteem. These forms of misrecognition interlock and accumulate over careers, producing deep identity fissures. Sparring partners are not passive recipients of disrespect, however; they fashion alternative recognition strategies to sustain selfhood. The study contributes to the sociology of sport and the sociology of work by documenting the hidden human costs of achievement-centred governance and offering an extreme case of invisible, appropriated bodily labour.