Is China amusing sports to death?

Sports in China is in the age of show business. As Jia Ding, who directed opening and closing ceremonies of IAAF World Championships BEIJING 2015 said, sports itself is entertainment. For the director, the arrangement for a sports ceremony is much easier than before because of adding entertainments into sports, rock and roll in a closing ceremony, for example. 

Recreation brings life in Sports in China, of course, now that it was once a very professional and inaccessible industry for common Chinese people. As the economy develops, nationwide fitness has been listed in China’s national strategies, which lifted the mysterious veil of athletics in the arena. 

Zou Shiming,  a Chinese professional boxer and the current WBO International flyweight champion, joined several reality shows to present as a husband, father and son-in-law. In the eyes of his wife, this role transition is a chance for Zou to experience the real life because intense training often isolates athletics from others. As sports link amusement, more and more professional athletics begin seeking their roles in show business. Pan Xiaoting the Queen of Nine-Ball, a 33-year-old professional pool player from China, told reporters that she would focus on billiard despite her frequent presence on TV shows recently and investment in a pictures company. 

The barriers between sports and entertainment still exist. Peter Chan, a producer who is arranging for a film about Li Na the tennis player, found that most sports star in China are educated under the traditional sports training system, while their fans are quite different from them, which is why they cannot share in common from time to time. Therefore, entertainment-oriented sports or sports-oriented entertainment may not be wrong, but still has a long way to go.  

The fact is that we have seen too much amusement in some sports stars' reality show by nosing into their privacy and standing by their embarrassment, which is harmful to both athletics themselves, and sports industry as a whole. In conclusion, recreation is a proper way to publicize mass fitness and professional sports only when we could deal with the balance between profession and entertainment.

Surce: China Youth Daily, Xinhua News