{
  "abstract": "Background\n\nSince 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\n\nTo 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\n\nUsing 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\n\nExercise 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\n\nExercise 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.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China.",
    "Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, China.",
    "Anhui Professional & Technical Institute of Athletics, Hefei, China."
  ],
  "article_type": "research article",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 4,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0,
        1
      ],
      "name": "Lamei Deng"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Zhicheng Wang"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Wei Liu"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Chenyong Wei"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4fxgw8mnk64jd.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1912354",
  "fulltext_url": "https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13677853",
  "id": "4fxgw8mnk64jd",
  "issns": [
    "1664-1078"
  ],
  "landing_url": "https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42898450",
  "language": "eng",
  "licence": "CC-BY",
  "licence_label": "CC BY",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "openalex",
      "2737|Physical Activity and Health"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7220359306",
  "pdf_url": "https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13677853?pdf=render",
  "pmcid": "PMC13677853",
  "pmid": "42898450",
  "published": "2026-10-05",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4fxgw8mnk64jd.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:19:37Z",
      "native_id": "MED:42898450",
      "source": "europepmc",
      "url": "https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42898450"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "medicine",
      "origin": "openalex:2737|Physical Activity and Health",
      "subfield": "physiology"
    }
  ],
  "title": "The changing returns to physical exercise in China (2010-2023): a nine-wave repeated cross-sectional study.",
  "title_text": "The changing returns to physical exercise in China (2010-2023): a nine-wave repeated cross-sectional study.",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:19:37Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4fxgw8mnk64jd",
  "venue": "Frontiers in psychology",
  "versions": []
}