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Spinning tops give senior citizens in NE China’s Jilin new lease of life

(People's Daily Online)    10:12, July 01, 2020

A spinning-top club made up of over 40 senior citizens in Changchun, northeast China’s Jilin province, has been attracting increasing attention due to their use of various innovative handmade tops, with the biggest weighing 65 kilograms, the WeChat account of China News Service reported Monday.

Sun Shuyou playing with a spinning top. (Photo/Zhang Yao)

The exercise makes them happier and healthier, according to these spinning-top enthusiasts, who said that thanks to this activity, the cervical spondylosis and scapulohumeral periarthritis that had troubled them for years are now gone. The eldest member of the club is 80 years old.

As they grew more and more skilled at the game, they were no longer satisfied with just playing regular tops, so they got creative and started to make their own tops using all kinds of scrap, including old gas cylinders, steel tubes, paperbark, bearings, and colored LED lights.

According to Sun Shuyou, a spinning-top enthusiast and founder of the club, the top that weights 65 kilograms is the heaviest in northeast China.

Sun used to play spinning-tops when he was little, and picked up the game again in 2017. The first time, he tried a top weighing 1.5 kilograms. After that, he and his friend Liu Qingfa transformed an old gas cylinder into a top and decorated it with colored lights. The new top became popular as soon as they began playing with it in public.

As the tops he played with got bigger and increasingly elaborate, Sun quickly became well-known in the field. At the same time, more and more people joined him in the game.

Sun said his dream is to establish a spinning-top association, and attract more senior citizens to the game, so that they can exercise together and bring greater happiness into their lives.

Many people still think that senior citizens in China spend their days sipping tea, going for quiet walks carrying caged birds, playing Mahjong, reading newspapers, or simply sitting in the sun, but these spinning-top enthusiasts have shattered this stereotype through colorful activities and extraordinary skills, all while staying fit and healthy.

When you see elderly people expertly practicing the ancient Chinese martial art of Tai Chi, spinning around horizontal and parallel bars, and deftly playing diabolo, you can’t help but wonder what is the limit to what a senior citizen can do.

As the country seeks to promote in-depth integration of its nationwide fitness campaign with people’s health, these senior citizens have backed up their ideas with action. 

(For the latest China news, Please follow People's Daily on Twitter and Facebook)(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)

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