Opinion | Will China’s plan to get everyone in the country exercising make an impact on Hong Kong?

Our young people get less exercise than prisoners and our politicians, parents and teachers are blind to the benefits of a sports culture – but the bosses in Beijing might convince 2017’s CE candidates of its merits

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Chief Executive CY Leung takes a selfie with China Olympic swimmer Fu Yuanhui – he might have to start paying a bit more attention to sport if he runs again in 2017.

Published: 6:15pm, 11 Nov 2016Updated: 8:38pm, 12 Nov 2016

Assuming President Trump hasn’t reduced China to smoking ash by March, Hong Kong will be having its own “election”. Given China’s recent policies, whoever Beijing picks for chief executive might have to pay more than lip service to sport.

After 2014’s oft-discussed forecast/demand that the mainland’s sports industry become a key part of the economy, the government is launching phase two. The State Council has issued several proclamations ordering authorities as well as “market players in the industry” to implement far-reaching plans to get the public actively engaged in sport and exercise at an unprecedented level.

On Thursday Yang Shuan, the Deputy Director of the State Administration of Sports declared at a Party work conference that the National Fitness Programme was an “important national strategy”.

That plan demands that 700 million people take part in exercise at least once a week by 2020. It mainly targets young people and ties in with another initiative, ‘Healthy China 2030’, and the sports industry transformation. Sport is to be a key part of education and the community, with everyone within 15 minutes of a sports facility; the sports economy will naturally boom.

Obese Chinese children exercise in a fitness center during a military training summer camp at the Shenyang Artillery College in Shenyang city, northeast Chinas Liaoning province, 30 July 2009. China faces an obesity epidemic, a senior academic with the release of a report predicting that the worlds most populous country will have 200 million people who are dangerously overweight within the next several years. Image by © Imaginechina/Corbis

What does this have to do with Hong Kong? We still have our own government and policies after all. Maybe for a bit longer anyway. Well, whoever the mandarins deem suitable to “run for election” in 2017, surely it will be politic for them to support China’s grand sporting and fitness ambitions.

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