ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the development process of women’s sport and exercise participation since the economic reform in contemporary China, and finds that the rise of women’s sport and exercise at the grassroots level is riddled with complexities and contradictions. Chinese women have gained opportunities to participate in a vast range of sport and have reconstructed sport values and organisations, while in turn sport has become a means to make women positive, pleasure-loving and empowered. However, limitations within the sport system and social stratification in the wider society have restricted the sustainable development of women’s sport as a whole. Chinese women cannot utilise sport opportunities created by the economic reform equally; ideas concerning women’s inferiority and gender inequality still remain.
