ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the distinctive features of Chinese high-performance sports that have progressed with the ongoing reforms over recent decades. The field of high-performance sports has undergone constant institutional changes, and it analyses such collective trajectories via the prisms of commercialisation and professionalisation of sports in China at ten-year intervals. In 1992, as the Chinese government decided to officially introduce a market economy in the 14th National Communist Party Congress, the high-performance sports policy changed dramatically. The commercialisation and professionalisation of high-performance sports in China began in 1993. Commercialisation attracted the capital to replace the government's support, and the lives of Chinese citizens and sports became more closely attached according to the league's growth. China's spectacular economic success since reform and opening up has resulted in a massive expansion of the Chinese sports market, and the Chinese government realises that it should more actively reflect the requirements of the market in administering the sports system.
