In China, no place to play

BEIJING - When Wu Yifu wants to play basketball with his friends, he has to travel 30 minutes by subway, pay $2, and then wait up to two hours to get on the public court. Sure it's a hassle, the 15-year-old junior high student said, but it's still better than other basketball courts, which charge twice as much.

Wu is lucky. At least he has some place to go. As China prepares to host the Olympics, dreaming of national glory and gold medals galore, a huge number of Chinese lack even basic exercise facilities to help release stress in this tightly wound society.

The disconnect reflects a system that has put most of its money and political will into its elite sports system and relatively little into fitness programs for the average Zhou.

China's changing social and economic dynamics also have made younger residents less likely to focus on physical conditioning.

"Chinese parents tend to be concerned only with studying, studying," said Ma Xiuhua, a "50-something" mother and manager of a sports equipment store in Beijing.

Although China recently beefed up rural sports budgets, a survey last year found only one in 10 Chinese met the national physical training standard, a 20 percent decline since 2000.

In Beijing's Jianguomen neighborhood, most of those exercising along a narrow strip of land beside the exhaust-choked second ring road are senior citizens.

About 47 percent of Chinese retirees exercise each week, according to one study, compared with just 14 percent of working-age Chinese.

That compares with 47 percent of all American women and 50 percent of American men, according to a 2005 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the group's most recent.

"Younger people don't seem to have time to exercise," said Shi Xueqin, 80. "They're too worried about making money."

Not that they necessarily could if they wanted to. About 60 percent of urban Chinese in a China Youth Daily survey released in June said they had no place to exercise. The United States has 16 times more space per person devoted to fitness than China.

Although China's budget for elite, competition-level sports is a state secret, there's a quiet debate in academia over the relative merit of funneling so much money into national glorification.

Scholars say they're keeping quiet, at least until after the Olympics, given how much government "face" is tied to winning gold and pulling off a successful show.

Some say China's East German-style sports system - in which children as young as 5 are streamed into relentless, year-round training as wards of the state - is such a fundamental part of Communist Party architecture and so racked with vested interests that it won't be transformed until the state is.

"If you look at Cuba, Russia, North Korea, eastern Europe, these programs don't change until the political system does," said Luciano Barra, former head of Italy's Olympic Committee.

In a hypercharged economy and a society of one-child families, there is also fear the "little emperors" could injure themselves.

"Chinese kids eat too much and too well, and after meals they might be too full to exercise," Vice Minister Feng Jianzhong said at a news conference late last month.

Yet there can be unforeseen consequences. Fear of drowning keeps many parents from having their youngsters learn to swim. But as a result, drowning, by some measures, is the No. 1 cause of accidental juvenile death.

Young Chinese are most likely to break a sweat in junior high school when they're required to pass a national fitness exam. Students train for months doing push-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups, running and long-jumping. After the test, however, many return to their exercise-free regimen.

There are other deterrents: A few years ago, local Communist Party officials converted the sports grounds of Chenghua School into luxury housing for themselves, the Nanjing Daily reported.