Driven by the strong motivation of hosting Winter Olympics, the Chinese government has created and enacted the Promotion Plan of Mass Winter Sports and the National Construction Plan of Winter Sports Infrastructure. The former targets the involvement of 50 million people in winter sports pursuits and 300 million people participating in winter sports by 2025 and the latter aims to build 650 skating rinks and 800 ski resorts by 2022.
Since 2013 when it first proposed hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, China's winter sports industry has progressed in leaps and bounds. The past few years have witnessed the involvement of government, enterprises, institutions, capital, society and the media, and the improvement of a complete winter sports industry chain along with the cultivation of winter sports culture.
Last year, the scale of the Chinese winter sports industry reached 397 billion yuan ($60.17 billion) and it is expected to hit 600 billion yuan in 2020 and ultimately reach 1 trillion yuan in 2025 hitting the target of accounting for 20 percent of sports industry's gross output. The latest data show that China's ski resorts had nearly doubled to more than 700 in 2017 from about 300 in 2014. Particularly worth mentioning is that of the less than 50 indoor ski resorts in the world China accounts for 21.
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