Open-Air Fitness Dancing
The Open-Air Fitness Dancing (广场舞) , known as Chinese fitness, is a spontaneous communal dancing in the park or public square to keep fitness.
Composed of various dancing elements, the dancing features no uniform movements and standards. It is easy to learn and plays a role in people’s health, attracting more participants and becoming a trendy lifestyle.
Over the past three decades of rapid growth heralded by reform and opening-up policy, Chinese diets have seen dramatic changes to be more nutritious and people realize that they need more outdoor exercises to keep healthier.
Meanwhile, the dancing helps the elderly to get rid of loneliness and gives them a sense of belonging after retirement as the country struggles with an aging population.
Statistics show that more than 100 million people love such a way of fitness in China, the bulk of whom are middle and old aged women aged between 45 and 65.
The dancing is highly inclusive as a mixer of bodybuilding exercises, folk dance, ballroom dance, Latin dance, Indian dance and belly dance. The music accompanying the dancing also features a strong taste of hotchpotch.
However, the residents in the neighborhood were harassed by the loud noise of the dancing music, triggering conflicts over the dancing in cities all around the country.
On November 16, 2013, dozens of students from the No. 1 Kailuan High School in Tangshang City, Hebei Province, stood silent in two rows in Phoenix Mountain Park for an outcry against noisy dancing music lingering in the park just a way across their school.
They were dressed in white T-shirts printed with words saying “Dear Grandpa and Grandma, Uncles and Aunts, would you mind to keep your voices down when we are in classes? Bless you and thank you!”
In October 2013, residents from the neighborhood of Hankou City, Hubei Province, who were agitated by the loud dancing music downstairs, made a final blow to the elderly women dancing in the public square downstairs by throwing shits towards them after throwing coins and rubbles into the noisy crowd came in vain.
In the same month, a resident surnamed Shi from Changping District of Beijing City ran into quarrels with his neighbors as they danced in the square downstairs noisily. He fired his double-barrel shotgun into the sky and rushed three Tibetan mastiffs he bred into the crowd to dispel the dancers. Shi got arrested for illegal possession of firearms.
