REACHING PAST MEDALS

By LI LI

REACHING PAST MEDALS

By LI LI

China showed its formidable dominance on the gold medal tally at the 16th Asian Games on the first full day’s competition after winning 19 out of 28 gold medals. However, not everyone was equally elated with China’s gold rush.

The next day, a veteran sports journalist from Xinhua News Agency, Yang Ming, wrote an editorial titled Reflection on China’s Absolute Dominance, revealing the irony between China’s great strides in competitive sports in recent years and the general population’s deteriorating physical fi tness.

He wrote, “During the past 20 years China has made great achievements in competitive sports, but people’s health is obviously deteriorating. Isn’t it an irony and a shame?”

Using fi gures to prove the deterioration of the public health, Yang said official statistics show China has 160 million patients with high blood pressure, 160 million people suffering from high blood fat and a population of 200 million obese people; one out of fi ve urban children are overweight; more than 85 percent of senior middle school students suffer from myopia; China’s per-capita possession of sports facilities and percentage of population regularly exercising don’t rank in the top 10 in Asia.

Yang also suggested China should send amateurs, such as college students, to compete on behalf of the country at the next Asian Games to ensure fair competition with athletes from other Asian countries and dilute the public’s obsession with a gold medal haul.

Yang’s article has triggered a heated online debate. Many people agree with his opinion that the gold tally can’t show whether a country is strong in sports and instead of investing vast resources on nurturing elites,China should attach more significance to mass sports development.

Yang’s opponents instead strongly support China’s pursuit for gold medals, saying that it could motivate more people to engage in physical activities as well as boost China’s national spirit.

In response to Yang’s controversial article, Duan Shijie, Chef de Mission of Chinese Sports Delegation to the Asian Games and Vice Minister of China’s General Administration of Sport (GAS), toldBeijing Morning Postthat the GAS has attached great importance to popular sports despite the fact that its investment in this field is incomparable to that in competitive sports.“But local governments invest generously in popular sports. Moreover, competitive sports can inspire the masses to exercise. For example, more kids play football during the

A new discussion on how to make China a sports power but not only on the medal tally World Cup,” said Duan.

Secretary General of the Chinese Sports Delegation Cai Jiadong said “China’s absolute dominance at the medal tally” is a misstatement as the country’s record gold medal haul is partly attributable to the fact that there was an increase in events at the 2010 Asian Games.

Urgently needed reform

The debate has boiled down to a new round of discussion to how and when to reform China’s medal-oriented sports administrative system, where limited government resources for developing sports focus on training full-time athletes promising medals at international events.

This Olympics-driven system is known as a whole-nation regime. Governmentfunded sports schools all over China, the most basic components of this system, handpick children with the best athletic potential.They then train them and promote the most talented to city teams, provincial teams and eventually national teams. These elites are expected to win as many medals as possible at the Olympics, Asian Games and other regional and international tournaments.

LI GANG

This regime has proved itself rather successful in achieving its goals. From winning just fi ve gold medals at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, China climbed to the top with 51 golds at the 2008 Beijing Games.There has been a corresponding increase in its medal tally at other world and regional tourneys.

But success has come at a high price.Astronomical amounts of money have been poured into the system to nurture only elite athletes. During the 2004 Athens Olympics,Li Liyan, a writer and researcher with the GAS, estimated that China spent nearly 700 million yuan ($103 million) on average to win just one Olympic gold medal. For a country with a large number of poor people and vast areas with poor infrastructure, that is very costly for achieving Olympic glory.

Even worse, the yawning gap between China’s popular sports, especially physical education in schools, and elite sports has resulted in the poor fi tness of Chinese youth in general. According to a survey by Wu Jian,a scholar from China’s National Institute of Educational Research, released earlier this year, compared with 2000, the obesity rate among Chinese children and teenagers has grown by nearly 50 percent and one out of four male school students in cities is overweight. The myopia rate among Chinese children and teenagers has jumped from 20 percent to 31 percent since 2000.

More people have begun to question whether this whole-nation regime has outlived its designed purpose after the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Speaking at a summary meeting on the organization of the Olympic Games, Chinese President Hu Jintao said China should transform itself into a real sports power and achieve balanced development between competitive and popular sports.

In an interview in October 2009, the former Minister of the GAS Yuan Weimin, said now is the best time for China to conduct reforms on its whole-nation regime. “We need to switch some energy and money from competitive sports to popular sports. The era when the Chinese people needed more gold medals in sports games to prove ourselves is over,” Yuan said.

According to an ongoing survey conducted by Huanqiu.com on whether China’s sports development should reduce its emphasis on gold medals, about 86 percent of respondents had chosen yes by November 30.

The GAS, the center of China’s highly organized whole-nation sports regime, also made some changes to China’s participation in the Asian Games, such as to stop calling the Asian Games a middle-term test in China’s preparation for the next Olympic Games. However, many people think these gestures to reform China’s sports administrative system are too trivial and slow.

Redistribution of resources

Many long-time observers of China’s sports administrative system believe the fundamental reason behind the slow progress is the lack of motivation of the GAS, which is reluctant to allocate more of its financial resources to popular sports and physical education in schools.

Wei Jizhong, former Secretary General of the Chinese Olympic Committee, was quoted by news magazineChina Weeklyas saying the Chinese Government supports the development of popular sports in two ways: constructing sports facilities and using a large part of the revenue from sports lotteries as expenses for popular sports activities.Wei said the problem for now is the Central Government’s sound policies are not well implemented locally as the funding for developing popular sports has been used for other purposes.

Chen Peide, former head of Zhejiang Province’s administration of sport, expressed the same concern in an interview on November 24.

Many observers say the GAS should also be held accountable for the low-quality physical education in China’s primary and middle schools. They suggest if the GAS fails to get the job done, it should transfer some resources given by the government to China’s education authorities, which will be in charge of rejuvenating physical education.“This means the GAS will have to sacri fi ce its interests in the redistribution of resources and might resist this idea,” Yang wrote in a second article.

In an interview byChina Dailyin April,Zheng Yefu, a sociology professor from Peking University, suggested the GAS be cut down in size and given control of only elite sports, especially Olympics sports, and it could be renamed the “Chinese Olympic Association.” Its performance should be measured not only in terms of the number of gold medals won, but also how much a gold medal costs. And its fi rst priority should be slashing the average cost of gold medals rather than winning more.

Zheng said its responsibility for other sports should be handed over to other organizations. For example, sports with commercial potential such as soccer, basketball and tennis, should be commercialized, and communities and enterprises should be given control.

He also suggested a law prescribing the basic facilities and time needed for physical education in schools should be passed.

Huang Jianxiang, a veteran sports journalist, toldInternational Herald Leaderthat the largest barrier to the reform of China’s sports administrative system is that the GAS,which benefits from the current system,might use its power and resources to resist the reform.

Huang said the whole-nation regime to train athletes could be maintained for some events where China enjoys advantages, such as table tennis, badminton, shooting, weightlifting and gymnastics. Meanwhile, he said funding for other events should be spent on developing physical education in schools,thus expanding the participation base for these events.