Frontiers in Psychology · Oct 5, 2026

The changing returns to physical exercise in China (2010-2023): a nine-wave repeated cross-sectional study

By Deng L, Wang Z, Liu W et al.

BACKGROUND: Since 2008, when China began to implement its strategy of building a sports power, the institutional context of physical exercise has changed substantially. Yet the temporal dynamics of the socioeconomic correlates of exercise remain underexplored. OBJECTIVES: To examine whether and how physical exercise participation and its associations with income, self-rated health, and social trust changed over the 2010-2023 study period. METHODS: Using nine waves of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS 2010-2023, N = 78,467), we estimate annual marginal effects of exercise through ordinary least squares regression with exercise-by-year interactions. Three policy periods corresponding to phases of the Sports Power strategy are compared. RESULTS: Exercise participation rose from 31.68% in 2010 to 51.26% in 2023. The exercise-income association increased from 0.301 (Period 1, 2010-2012) to 0.367 (Period 3, 2018-2023, +21.9%), although formal cross-period tests did not reach statistical significance; the upward trend is therefore only weakly consistent with Hypothesis 1. The exercise-health association was negative and appeared to deepen across periods, but the cross-period differences lost statistical significance once the non-comparable 2011 wave was excluded, so this apparent change is interpreted cautiously. The exercise-trust association moved from a non-significant -0.013 to -0.101 (SE = 0.014). Subgroup analyses showed larger income associations for men than women (0.420 versus 0.279) and for rural than urban residents (0.449 versus 0.180). CONCLUSION: Exercise participation rose markedly over the study period, and the exercise-trust association turned increasingly negative, but the exercise-income association did not strengthen to a statistically significant degree, and the health-selection pattern was sensitive to the exclusion of the 2011 wave. The observed changes are read as population-level associations rather than causal effects of the Sports Power strategy.

doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1912354Open accessPubMed 42898450Populations