This Day, That Year

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.