Historical Review of State Policy for Physical Education in the People's Republic of China

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of Chinese state policy on physical education in the context of Chinese History, from 1949 to 2010. It demonstrates the origin and continuity of state policy, and addresses the strong effect of politics and social and economic transformation in shaping state policy on physical education in China. It considers that the formation and development of state policy on physical education in China has always been shaped by political, cultural and ideological requirements. From the 1950s to the 1970s, for ideological reasons, China imported the Soviet Union's physical education techniques, which emphasised physique-oriented sporting skill learning, and abandoned American physical education concepts that was focused on cultivating students' personalities. Since the beginning of the reform and the opening-up of China in the late 1970s, physical education in China not only was de-militarised, but it also generally realised a transformation from a physique-oriented national interest requirement to serving multi-objectives and being student-oriented.