Outline released to build China into sports leader

The State Council issued a circular on Sept 2, outlining the plan to develop China into a leading sports power.

According to the circular, people who often take exercise should account for over 45 percent of the population by 2035; China should become a modern leading sports socialist country by 2050, and its people’s physical fitness, comprehensive levels and global influence in sports should be ranked near the top globally.

To achieve these goals, the circular set major tasks in five aspects, including national fitness, athletics, sports industry, sports culture and sports exchange.

In order to advance the national fitness campaign, effort should be made to improve the public service system, give play to the role of the State Council’s joint ministerial conference on national fitness and build joint meeting mechanisms on national fitness at the local government level, the document read.

Coordinated work is also required to build venues and facilities for national fitness, including city greenways, sports parks, community squares for entertainment and sports and places for football and winter sports. To that end, empty rooms and underground spaces in cities should be utilized properly.

People’s health should be put at the core of the campaign, with national fitness plans to be formulated and implemented and scientific fitness knowledge and methods to be disseminated.

Sports activities should be encouraged in key groups, including teenagers, the elderly, farmers and the disabled, and information technologies such as IoT and cloud computing should be applied to obtain a smart development of national fitness.

Athletics will also get a boost through allowing private organizations to enter the sports industry, promoting football, basketball and volleyball and supporting the development of vocational sports. Preparations were encouraged for the coming Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympic Games, the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

The circular also calls on efforts to build a modern sports industry system through building a complete sports industry chain, accelerating the integrated development of sports and its related industries, and promoting the coordinated development of regional sports industries.

The development, design and manufacturing of sports goods will be supported, and their supply capacity will be improved as well, the circular read, adding more mass sports activities should be organized and sports games should be held during holidays to stimulate people’s consumption.

The circular also requires greater effort to develop sports culture, increase sports exchanges with foreign countries, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, refine the mechanism of pouring public funds into the sports sector, and cultivate more sports talent.