China’s wall of sporting repression gone?
Author: The Times - Matthew Syed
Date: 22 Mar 2007
Category: Articles
I had been expecting — hoping, even — that the National Training Centre in Beijing would live up to its Orwellian billing. The beating heart of China’s sporting beast, whose tentacles reach out across the provinces in search of potential champions, it has been portrayed as a throwback to the age of totalitarianism, where athletes live the tightly regimented lives of prisoners and endure hardships that would not be tolerated in the West.
It is a chill day but the sun is shining vigorously. My taxi pulls up at the entrance near the Temple of Heaven and a guard in a khaki jacket asks me for ID. Over his shoulder, a number of large buildings — some modern, some drab, one imperialistic — line a walkway. I phone the interpreter of the China table tennis team, whose offices are within the complex, and she jogs towards the entrance to usher me into an area that houses the greatest concentration of sporting talent on the planet.
We make our way to the last building on the right, a grey, concrete affair that accommodates weightlifting on the ground floor and table tennis on the other four. My first surprise occurs when we reach the third floor and I find my old adversary, Yan Sen, a chain-smoking wide-boy with an Olympic doubles gold medal, supervising the junior women’s team. We exchange high fives and he ushers me on to one of the two dozen tables to spar with his star protégé.
I am in jeans and the youngster — unsure who I am — is bemused but willing. Only after a couple of rallies does she realise that I can slice a ball with the best of them and we have a cracking knock-up. The other girls giggle and start to imitate my somewhat unorthodox style.
We go up to the top floor, where the Chinese men are playing in a practice competition. I repair to one of the small function rooms off the main corridor for a chat with Zhang Xielin, the vice-president of the China Table Tennis Association. Wang Liqin, the world No 1, sits on one of the low couches to reglue his bat and others put their heads around the door to say “Hi”. A coach ambles in and lights up. The informality is only slightly less pronounced than an East End boozer.
We cross the walkway, for I have asked to look at the badminton hall. As many have reported, the entrance to each building is guarded, but the guard in this case is a middle-aged woman with baggy tracksuit bottoms and a grin the size of the Grand Canyon. She takes all of three seconds to wave me into the elevator. On the top floor, the badminton team have finished training and are practising a dance routine for a sporting festival. The music is iffy, as are the moves, but the communal merriment is what one might expect from adolescents grooving in public.
I tell this story as a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom that the Chinese sporting system is like that of the former Soviet Union, only more sinister. Reports have focused almost exclusively on instances of oppression, which, although they undoubtedly exist, have had the effect of detaching perception from the changing reality of sporting life in China. The National Training Centre reminded me less of a prison camp than it did of INSEP, the French sports complex in the heart of the Vincennes forest.
It is interesting that Western coaches are quick to allude to the dictatorial aspects of the Chinese system. It is common to hear them pointing out that their Chinese counterparts have a formidable advantage since they are able to impose demands on their players that would not be tolerated in liberal democracies. But the truth is precisely the reverse. The growing success of China is the consequence of its gradual retreat from authoritarianism.
Take table tennis. Twenty years ago, national team players had every last detail of their lives controlled by the regime. They were forced to hand prize-money to the state and when they faced each other in the latter stages of international competitions, the coaches decided who would win. The political establishment even involved itself in sporting technique, instructing the players to adopt the Maoist orthodoxy of the penholder grip. This culminated in the surrendering of global pre-eminence in the 1980s to Sweden, a nation with less than 0.2 per cent of the number of regular players in China.
In today’s China, athletes are allowed to keep half their prize-money and have huge financial incentives to win Olympic medals. Many have lucrative endorsement contracts, armies of adoring fans and the freedom to choose their style of play. Top players would laugh in the face of any coach who instructed them to lose a match. The effect has been to unleash a torrent of creativity, with many adopting audacious new techniques in their quest for personal and economic advancement. China’s present domination of world table tennis is unprecedented.
There is another crucial factor in the breathtaking ascent of Chinese sport (in addition, of course, to brute numbers), but, again, it involves hard cash rather than state oppression. Partly as a consequence of the huge investment flowing in from abroad, the Chinese Government has been able to spend record sums on players, coaches and facilities in pursuit of Olympic supremacy. It is reported that there are in excess of 3,000 athletes in full-time training for the Beijing Games next year, more than five times the number of athletes who will compete.
The lingering tendency to repression, which exists among ageing members of the sporting establishment, is hindering rather than assisting progress. Even at the notorious sports schools, where youngsters endure harsh training regimes, there is recognition of the need for change. One top official has been quoted as saying that children will perform better if they are given a more rounded education. As Liu Jiayi, a table tennis coach now working in England, put it: “Players tend to excel when they are treated like human beings.”
The only freedom worth having is the freedom to make mistakes, so I leave you with Kong Linghui, the poster boy of Chinese table tennis. Winner of the men’s singles gold medal at the Sydney Olympics, Kong narrowly escaped a jail sentence for drink-driving recently when he crashed his Porsche into a taxi after a night on the tiles. A few days later, he is rumoured to have lost $20,000 (about £10,200) on a single hand of blackjack. When Chinese sportsmen feature in tales of excess that could teach Premiership footballers a thing or two about mindlessness, we can be pretty confident about the authenticity of the liberal reforms — even if there is some way still to go.
