Sports+Empowering Rural Revitalization: Research on the Living Inheritance of Yunnan Ethnic Traditional Sports and Rural Spatial Production: A Spatial Production Theory Perspective

China's rural revitalization policy has put sport to work as a development tool, but we still know surprisingly little about what sport actually does to the places where it is used. This paper looks at Yunnan, where ethnic minority communities have practiced traditional sports for generations, and asks how these practices shape the production of rural space. We draw on Henri Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and on fieldwork carried out between March 2023 and August 2024 in three sites: Shilin Yi Autonomous County, Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, and Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture. Combining participant observation, 87 semi-structured interviews, and spatial documentation, we trace how each site produces space through spatial practice, institutional representations, and lived experience. Four mechanisms recur across the three cases, though in different combinations: ritual and recreational space become fused; embodied cultural practice is turned into a commodity; sports events connect communities across ethnic lines and across borders; and transmission spaces keep knowledge moving between generations. These mechanisms give villages a way to build spatial identities that hold out against homogenization, but they come with costs, above all the tension between commercialization and cultural authenticity. We argue that spatial production theory, rarely used in sports research, helps make sense of these trade-offs, and we draw out what the findings mean for protecting intangible cultural heritage within revitalization programs.