| Chinese farmers benefiting from Sport-for-All drive | |||
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Despite the chilly weather, Xiao Jinren got up at seven o'clock Wednesday morning to do fitness exercises at a square nearby his house. Xiao, a 63-year-old farmer who lives in the Caozha Village in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, has kept this habbit since 2006 when a quantity of sports facilities were set up in his viallge's square. "The facilities are very much welcomed by the villagers," said Xiao. "There are about 30 villagers doing exercises every morning, and sometimes I have to line up for up to 10 minutes for using them." Like Xiao, hundreds of millions of Chinese farmers are benefiting from the government's efforts to establish fitness facilites in the country's vast rural area, part of its nationwide Sport-for-All drive. Besides the basic fitness equipment, other facilities for table tennis and basketball, which are more popular among the youth, are also established in some 200,000 villages across China. "As the living standard in rural area improves gradually and fitness facilites are being set up, more and more farmers have joined the initiative to do excises every day," Wang Youxuan, an official in Dongyuan town in Ningxia, told Xinhua. Xiao said it's not easy for farmers to live beyond his age, but nowadays many farmers can live to their 80s or 90s. "Thanks to the better living conditions, the senior people like me would like to do more excises so we can live longer happy life," he said. |
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