Mao Zedong’s Thoughts on Sport and His Influence on China’s Sport Policy and Practice

This article first introduces Mao Zedong’s early experience with and understanding of sport in the 1910s and 1920s. It then explains how his thought on and instruction in sport and physical education has contributed to the Communist Revolution in the 1930s and 1940s, and in what ways Mao Zedong Thought was reflected and promoted in the field of sport in the PRC between 1949 and 1976. Mao’s sport ideas were based on his vision of a socialist utopia. For him, sport and physical education served multiple purposes in the process of building China into a strong and modern socialist state: first, improving the health and fitness of the worker-farmer masses; second, cultivating a strong workforce for industrialization and modernization; third, enhancing the country’s military power for national defence; fourth, reinforcing the cohesion of the proletarian class; and fifth, mobilizing the masses against capitalism, elitism, revisionism, feudalism and imperialism. Throughout the Mao era, sport was promoted across all sectors and levels of society, transforming people’s lifestyles in a unique way. It also played a crucial role in political and ideological propaganda, serving to implement the wider state policy and political vision of the CCP leadership, headed by Mao.