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Item from June 29, 1995, in China Daily: Several thousand Beijing employees performed group exercises at the Beijing Workers' Stadium yesterday. A massive national fitness drive was launched yesterday to promote mass sporting activities and to help build up Chinese physiques ... The number of gyms has reached 550,000 around the country, which is more than 100 times greater than the number in 1949 ...
The fitness program, which takes into account the whole nation but emphasizes the younger generation, has set goals for the period up to 2010 ... Schools will be encouraged to upgrade sporting facilities and to ensure that physical education is an important part of the curriculum.
In the past two decades, technological development has changed Chinese lifestyles profoundly - TV, the Internet, automobiles and fast food form some of the major comforts of modern life. Those have in turn affected the overall fitness of Chinese people, especially the younger generation of city dwellers.
Physical fitness levels in China have plunged in the years between 1988 and 2013, according to a survey by the General Administration of Sport. In Beijing, about one in five children and teenagers faced overweight problems in 2013, according to an annual report released by the local authorities last year.
The State Council has issued a National Fitness Program for 2011-2015 to help stem the tide, with measures including specified goals for the construction of national sports facilities.
To that effect, there were nearly 1.7 million sports fields totaling about 2 billion square meters by the end of last year, official figures showed.
