Since Taiwan controlled well against the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in beginning of 2020, the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan (CPBL) was able to hold ball games without attendance in April and became the “only” professional baseball season in the world at that time. The CPBL launched live English-language broadcast on Twitter to attract sports fans from the U.S., Japan, and the rest of the world. This paper critically examined the “coronationalism” (the nationalist discourses during the outbreak) in Taiwan. First, Taiwanese professional baseball games, as well as the relative success in controlling the spread of coronavirus, were regarded as a national glory during the pandemic. Related news reports in foreign media and tweets from foreign baseball commentators were evidences that “the whole world was watching Taiwan.” Moreover, the debate of renaming the CPBL reflected the conflicting national identities within Taiwan society. Furthermore, the nationalist discourses duplicated the world system of baseball modeled after professional baseball leagues in the U.S. and in Japan. The nationalist discourses in Taiwan during the pandemic, which emphasized the CPBL games, the pandemic management as the national glory, and the world’s recognition of Taiwan, were distinctively different from racism and xenophobia observed in many other countries during this global public health crisis.
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