Square dancing (China)

Due to its low cost and ease of participation,[2] it has been estimated to have over 100 million practitioners, according to CCTV, the country's official television network.

Dancing for exercise has been recorded as developed millennia ago in Emperor Yao's China, and during the Song dynasty the public spaces of cities were noted for their use in performance.

Its popularity notwithstanding, square dancing has been the subject of considerable controversy in the 2010s China due to complaints of noise pollution in the evening or morning hours.

Residents of nearby apartment complexes who have been disturbed by the high volume of multiple dance groups' musical accompaniment, especially late in the evening and early in the morning when they are trying to sleep, have sometimes reacted violently.

[5] In 2015 the Chinese government reacted to these complaints and incidents by prescribing a set of standardized routines for all dancers to follow, claiming they would be culturally unifying and healthier.

They begin as early as 5:30 a.m., and tend to use spaces nearer supermarkets so they are better positioned to bargain for and purchase fresh vegetables when the markets open.

[5] A Beijing group attracted international attention in summer of 2014 for performing Cultural Revolution-era songs like "Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China" outside a local shopping mall every night, wearing military uniforms and using toy guns as props.

Some dances are complicated and demanding, but the majority are low-impact routines that primarily consist of holding the dancer's arms in front of the body in varied positions.

"I used to be quick to lose my temper, but now nothing bothers me," a similarly aged retired paper mill worker explained to The New York Times about the effect square dancing had had on her.

Beyond that, most residents said they thought guangchangwu is good for health, both mental and physical – 62% saw regular dancing as exercise and recreation, and 61% believed it helps elderly people expand their social circles and dispel loneliness.

The Lüshi Chunqiu, an encyclopedia compiled in the third century B.C.E., during the Spring and Autumn period, describes how, two millennia earlier in the time of Emperor Yao, people began to dance slowly in order to reinvigorate their muscles after lengthy rains had kept them indoors, sometimes leading to joint diseases.

"As time passed, they discovered that some activities could promote appetite, strengthen muscles and bones, and get rid of fatigue," writes one historian of Chinese traditional medicine.

[8] The origins of modern square dancing have been traced to the Cultural Revolution that swept China during the 1960s and early '70s, in the broader context of the country's urbanization.

A decade later, CCP chairman Mao Zedong began the Great Leap Forward economic development initiative to accelerate industrialize the Chinese economy.

[13] Ultimately, the Great Leap Forward proved disastrous, failing to industrialize effectively and causing famine due to labor shortages on farms.

Since urban intellectuals' thought was believed to have been tainted by awareness or memory of capitalism, many were sent to rural areas to live, work and be properly re-educated through review of Mao's writings.

Performances often helped relieve tensions between the party and the peasantry during times when food was scarce, although during the more repressive period of the Cultural Revolution, yangge was itself banned along with many other traditional forms of expression.

Following the arrest and trial of the Gang of Four, including Mao's widow for perpetrating it, Deng Xiaoping took over as CCP chairman and instituted a program of economic reform which continues as "socialism with Chinese characteristics".

[8] Women who had experienced the brunt of the Cultural Revolution and its dislocations in their teens and young adulthood, including the exposure to and participation in yangge performances,[1] began to reach mandatory retirement age in the mid-1990s, or were laid off from state-run enterprises following privatization.

Chinese urban planners had prioritized commerce and industry, often demolishing older neighborhoods with small houses and replacing them with large high-rise apartment complexes, increasing population density.

Many were younger workers who complained that this noise pollution kept them or their families from getting needed rest, especially if different groups of dancers began turning their music up to compete with each other.

"One man bouncing his infant daughter says he fears the first words she will speak are the saccharine lyrics that waft in daily through the walls and windows," the BBC reported in 2013.

In Wenzhou, one group pooled the equivalent of US$40,000 to purchase a sound system of their own, loudly reminding dancers to comply with Chinese noise pollution laws.

In a 2013 incident that gained national attention, a man in Beijing's outlying Changping District was arrested after he fired a shotgun in the air and set his three Tibetan Mastiffs on a nearby group of dancers.

While one group of dancers in Xi'an's Weiyang District voluntarily agreed to limit its routines to certain times and noise levels,[22] others have been more defiant.

[5] Song Jiahong, a humanities professor at Yunnan University, says this apparent insensitivity to loud noise is another effect of the Cultural Revolution, when propaganda read over loudspeakers was a constant feature of daily Chinese life.

Tong writes: As square dancing continues to flourish in the urban environment, the dancing activity happening on found and loosened space (urban public space temporarily appropriated by residents to meet their needs) reveals the tension between how the modern city is imagined and constructed, and how the real city is remade and lived in by common people, especially our elderly square dancers.

[23]As a remedy that his home city of Xuanhua could implement, he suggested closing off lanes of less busy streets in the neighborhoods favored by square dancers to create temporary pedestrian space.

[24] In March 2015, two government agencies, the State General Administration of Sports and the Ministry of Culture, announced the development of 12 model square dancing routines it had hired and trained instructors to introduce around the country.

Xinhua, the government's press agency, explained that the new routines would help make square dancing "a nationally unified, scientifically crafted new activity that brings positive energy to the people.