I wrote a really long answer and then accidentally hit “cancel” which deleted the entire comment. I’ll rewrite the important bits, but rewriting everything is too tedious. Sorry.

Basically, the answer to your questions depends on where you live, who you are and what you want. It’s very hard to give general answers. I’ll try, anyway.

1) I don’t think it matters much. Check what’s available, try them out and compare.
2) This depends entirely on where you are. I suggest asking a native speaker to help you look.
3) I have never had problems with this, but again, it might depend on where you are.

The reason I don’t write about this more is that there would have to be “it depends” disclaimers for every single sentence. 🙂

Good luck!

I have some questions :

(1) which sports would you consider more ‘social’? i.e. you can talk a little during the training, OR feel some kind of proximity with other people (because talking during training isn’t always good ;)), which will lead to discussion after training, to taking a drink and other activities outside of the club (in short, make friends from this). I’m thinking team sports… do they practice baseball in China, or is it just Japan and the USA in the whole world? 😛 Any other ideas?

(2) what kind of other clubs (i.e. not sports) could you join easily, as before with the objective of socializing? Board games look nice, you can easily talk and take your time 🙂 (I’d be interested in Go)

(3) can you easily join the above kind of clubs, at any moment of the year and only for the duration of your (short) stay? where do you have to inquiry to join a club at a random time?

Actually I’m thinking I’d like you to write an article basically explaining how to socialize in China if you go there with this sole purpose (no job, studies, whatever, completely vacations-like). With tons of good examples like this, and explaining what could work better or won’t be judged in a bad way specifically in China (thinking of cultural differences here, coz’ I really don’t know a lot about this for now).
Ideally I’d love some kind of program where you are hosted in a Chinese family, because that was my best time in Japan and also how I did tremendous progress (willing to pay for this). Well there’s WOOFing, but I’d like to avoid working and have my free time.