Beijing's Other Games: Dancing In The Park

NPR's All Things Considered reported on an unofficial "sport" going on this week during the Olympics. Every morning, thousands of people engage in their own brand of exercise: they dance. Here are some excerpts from the NPR article:

"At 7:30 a.m. in Red Scarf Park, it's time for Latin dance. Three hundred older Chinese are gliding across a polished stone floor in an outdoor pavilion.

The men wear pressed pants, and women twirl in pleated skirts. They do the tango, the Viennese waltz — even the jitterbug.

"I like dancing, I like music," says 52-year-old Ko Fengling, a regular. "I like it from the bottom of my heart. This way of working out is quite good. You can entertain yourself while you exercise."

Ko is retired from a clothing dye factory. Her dance partner is a former co-worker, Meng Xinghong, who seems shy.

When asked what draws him here, he takes the question the wrong way: He quickly points out that his relationship with his partner does not go beyond the dance floor.

"Working out has [a] lot of benefits," Meng says. "There's nothing else. I just like dancing."

Social Freedom With Dance
Fan Delong, who used to work in the Daqing Oil Fields in northeast China, enjoys the social freedom of dancing in the park. After retiring several years ago, he has come here every day in warm weather.

"There's no fixed partner," Fan says. "You can just look around whenever you come. When I invite people, if the person thinks I dance well, she'll accept my invitation. If she doesn't, I don't care. I can ask someone else."
And Fan — a lanky man who wears a baseball cap — says there are advantages to not dancing with your spouse.

"If you dance with your own people, there are more problems," Fan says. "If you make a wrong move and your wife says, 'You've stepped on my foot,' you have no other choice [but] to put up with it."

Beijingers have been ballroom dancing in parks for decades, but there was a time when they didn't. During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the government banned things it saw as foreign and bourgeois.

Lin Sunrong, who used to work as an interpreter for Chinese diplomats, describes that chaotic period in a diplomatic light.

"You could dance during the Cultural Revolution, but we didn't dance like the way we do today," Lin says. "It was revolutionary dance.""