From Empty Courts to Active Villages: What China Needs to Modernise Rural Sport

Public sports services can give rural residents accessible ways to exercise, protect their right to participate in sport and reduce health inequalities between rural and urban communities.

The study, 'Development and Validation of an Indicator System for the Modernization of Rural Public Sports Services in China,' by Xueting Gao and Jincao Zhai, was published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. It presents a new way to judge whether rural sports services are truly improving, looking far beyond the number of fitness areas, playing fields or exercise machines installed in villages.

Public sports services can give rural residents accessible ways to exercise, protect their right to participate in sport and reduce health inequalities between rural and urban communities. Shared activities can also bring neighbours together, strengthen community identity and support village-level governance. China has expanded rural fitness squares, sports parks, community events, instructor programmes and sports associations under national fitness, Healthy China and rural revitalisation policies, yet the presence of these resources does not guarantee that residents can use them regularly or find them suitable.

Some facilities receive little maintenance, organised activities may disappear once short-term projects end, and standardised programmes do not always reflect local ages, schedules, cultural interests or health needs. The researchers argue that genuine modernisation occurs when resources, service delivery, public participation and institutional support work as one connected system.

Modernisation Requires a Complete Service Cycle

The researchers built their framework using structural functionalism, new public service theory and systems science. Together, these perspectives describe rural sports services as a cycle in which resources enter the system, organisations turn them into usable services, residents communicate their experiences and needs, and institutions use that information to guide the next round of decisions.

The resulting indicator system contains four major domains, 12 subdomains and 36 observed indicators. Factor Upgrading covers human-resource organisation, financial-resource allocation, and material and technological foundations. It asks whether villages have enough skilled people, dependable funding, maintained facilities and appropriate digital support.

Structural Optimization examines the service-supply structure, governance operations and overall service effectiveness. Its indicators consider whether government departments, social organisations and other providers can cooperate, whether responsibilities and procedures are clear, and whether available resources produce accessible, locally suitable and health-promoting services.

Demand Responsiveness measures residents' perceptions of service quality, the ability of providers to respond to needs, and opportunities for villagers to express preferences or participate in decisions. Institutional Transformation assesses policy and economic support, cultural and health communication, technology use and talent development, all of which influence whether improvements can continue beyond temporary programmes.

Interviews, Experts and Residents Shaped the Framework

National, provincial and municipal policy documents were reviewed, including the Healthy China 2030 Outline, the National Fitness Plan for 2021–2025 and policies connecting sport with rural revitalisation.

Fieldwork covered three prefecture-level cities and six counties or districts in Shandong Province. Twenty-four people took part in semi-structured interviews, including county and township officials, village committee members, leaders of rural sports organisations and physically active villagers. Their interviews produced 187 initial concepts, which were refined into 43 categories and 14 central themes.

A panel of 20 experts then completed three rounds of Delphi consultation. The first round considered 64 possible indicators, the second reduced the pool to 36, and the third confirmed the final structure while refining several descriptions. Expert agreement increased across the rounds, and authority scores remained above 0.85, supporting the credibility of the consultation process.

A pilot questionnaire collected 105 valid responses before the formal survey began. Investigators distributed 435 questionnaires to rural residents, received 398 and retained 367 valid responses after quality checks, producing an effective response rate of 84.37%. The participants represented different ages, income levels, occupations, educational backgrounds and health conditions, though recruitment was practical and site-based rather than a province-wide random sample.

Funding, Health Benefits and Villager Participation Lead the Priorities

The researchers tested the framework's internal reliability and measurement structure using confirmatory factor analysis. All 36 indicators showed statistically significant factor loadings, while average variance extracted and composite reliability results supported convergent validity. Harman's test found that the first factor explained 21.04% of total variance, suggesting that no single common-method factor dominated the results.

The researchers tested four separate nine-item models, one for each domain, rather than a single model combining all 36 indicators. Several fit measures were strong, while RMSEA values ranged from 0.085 to 0.098, signalling that the models could still be improved. The analysis confirmed distinctions among the three subdomains within each domain, but it did not directly prove that all four main domains were fully distinct from one another.

An equal combination of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, based on expert judgement, and the entropy method, based on variation in residents' responses, was used to establish priorities. The highest-ranked issues included the rational allocation of diversified funding, the contribution of services to health promotion and effective use of sports resources, villagers' self-organised participation, successful policy implementation and the involvement of multiple service providers.

A Practical Tool With Limits That Still Need Testing

The framework could help local governments identify where a village's sports system is struggling. Weak resources may call for stable budgets, trained instructors, equipment maintenance or digital support. Poor service conversion may require clearer responsibilities and stronger coordination. Low demand responsiveness points towards regular resident meetings, activity evaluations, digital feedback channels and public procedures showing how local requests were handled.

County authorities could lead policy coordination, financing, data systems and professional training, while township bodies coordinate resources between villages and monitor implementation. Village organisations are best placed to maintain feedback channels, support self-organised groups and adjust activities to local demographic and cultural conditions. Linking sport with health, education, culture, volunteer services and grassroots governance would make these programmes part of a wider rural public-health system.

The findings should be interpreted carefully because the resident survey was limited to Shandong, used self-reported and cross-sectional data, and did not test whether higher indicator scores produce lasting improvements in physical activity, health or governance. The final weights may also change with different experts, samples or calculation choices.