Mass sport in China

China’s mass sport development has undergone peaks and troughs. From the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until the end of 1950s, the development of mass sport was given serious attention by the government in order to improve people’s health and serve the national defence and state-building. It then went through a period of turbulence from 1958 to 1976, against the background of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Since 1979, the shift in sport policy attention and the decision to prioritise the development of elite sport had inevitably downgraded the significance of mass sport and slowed down mass sport’s development. The agenda of developing sport for all was not considered priority between the 1980s and 2000s. It was after the 2008 Games that mass sport gradually began to gather momentum. More recently, Beijing’s success in bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics and the publication of the No. 46 National Strategy represented a watershed in the policy status of mass participation in China, with mass sport being considered as a state priority. This chapter therefore aims to provide an overview of the trajectory of China’s mass sport development and its related policy changes from 1949 to present particularly at some critical junctures.