Beyond National Heroines: Football, Representation, and Cold War East Asia – The Making of Taiwan’s Mulan Women’s Football Team

The Mulan Women’s Football Team has long been remembered in Taiwan’s collective memory as ‘national heroines’. Existing scholarship has focused on women’s sport, national identity, and Cold War diplomacy. Still, it has paid less attention to how the team emerged amid the reconfiguration of football representation in Cold War East Asia. Government archives, football association records, newspapers interpreted as political texts, and players’ retrospective accounts preserved in audiovisual materials demonstrate how the Mulan Team was historically constructed through the interplay of football representation, Cold War diplomacy, and media discourse. The team’s emergence was shaped not only by the development of women’s football but also by the contest over Chinese representation, the reconfiguration of Hong Kong football networks, FIFA’s politics of recognition, and the establishment and initiatives of the Asian Ladies Football Confederation. Rather than viewing the Mulan Team solely through the Cold War narrative of national heroines, the team is repositioned as an important participant in the early transnational development of women’s football and as a product of the changing politics of football representation in Cold War East Asia.