Creation: Editorial Department of the Proletarian Liberation Struggle Association
On November 20th, the Chinese revisionist ping-pong players encountered a five-match losing streak at the Fukuoka Finals of the World Table Tennis (WTT) professional league. Xuang Peng and Yuan Licen, who previously won the men’s doubles championship at the 2023 WTT Doha Finals, were eliminated in the quarterfinals. Meanwhile, Lin Gaoyuan, a multiple-time champion at the World Championships and World Cup, and Liang Jingkun, also a multiple-time champion at the World Championships, World Cup, and Asian Championships, were defeated in singles, also experiencing a “one-round exit.” Additionally, in women’s doubles, Sun Yingsha, who was highly praised, and Wang Yidi, a player who also won multiple titles at the 2022 and 2023 World Table Tennis Championships, faced setbacks and stopped at the quarterfinals. Finally, in men’s doubles, Lin Shidong and Lin Gaoyuan, who had previously won the 2024 Asian Table Tennis Mixed Doubles and Men’s Team Championships, also lost, resulting in the complete elimination of the Chinese team’s men’s doubles and singles. In women’s doubles, after Sun Yingsha and Wang Yidi’s exits, only Qian Tianyi and Chen Xingtong remained. Although there are still two women’s singles players, the Chinese team’s disastrous defeat is evident.
Why did the Chinese revisionist athletes, who have always claimed to be a so-called “sports power,” and even exaggerated the skills of their bourgeois athletes to divine levels, suffer a five-match losing streak? Some say it’s due to occasional mistakes, just “poor form,” which is untenable. If a single player’s failure can be explained as an accidental event, how can the failures of so many players be explained? Are all these athletes in “bad form”? Moreover, a series of recent performances clearly show that this failure is not isolated but a continuation of a series of defeats in previous Chinese revisionist table tennis competitions: at the Paris Olympics, Wang Chuqin was eliminated in the 32nd round, signaling a decline in Chinese ping-pong; on October 1st, Wang Chuqin failed again at the WTT China Grand Slam, again in the 32nd round; from October 7th to 13th at the Asian Championships, Wang Chuqin lost in the quarterfinals, Lin Shidong failed in the final to win the men’s singles title, totaling ten consecutive defeats, with only 2 golds, 2 silvers, and 1 bronze, behind Japan’s 3 golds, 2 silvers, 3 bronzes; during October 22-27 at the 2024 WTT Montpellier Champions, Lin Shidong suffered a brutal 0:4 defeat, Liang Jingkun exited in the quarterfinals, and Lin Gaoyuan and Xuang Peng had already been eliminated earlier. Such a long series of defeats cannot be reasonably explained by “poor form” as an abstract coincidence.
Some say it’s due to poor coordination, uneven skill levels between veteran and new players, or the absence of top players like Fan Zhendong and Ma Long, leading to a lack of talent in the Chinese ping-pong team. However, this explanation is also weak. The players mentioned have previously won multiple championships, and the so-called “old players” praised to divine levels are no different. If these players now face failure, then placing those who have yet to compete and whose defeats have not yet appeared in the same position will also, sooner or later, repeat their fate.
Others claim it’s due to internal “factional struggles” within the Chinese revisionist ping-pong team, where supposedly “top” veterans like Fan Zhendong and Ma Long have been pushed out, and so-called “promising” players are suppressed, with “resource tilt” towards “incompetent” players like Wang Chuqin. While this explanation is more detailed than the previous two, it remains speculative. Internal factional struggles do exist, but they are only superficial phenomena. Those who believe that China’s ping-pong decline is due to “good guys” being pushed out and “bad guys” remaining are merely proposing reformist “anti-corruption” schemes. Yet, they ignore the root cause: why did these factional struggles arise, and how did Chinese ping-pong once flourish and then rapidly decline? They cannot explain this either.
From a Marxist perspective, the problem can only be understood this way: sports, as part of the superstructure, is determined by the economic base, especially by the concentrated expression of the economy—politics. The strength of a country’s sports cannot be analyzed with super-classes perspectives but must be examined in relation to its political and economic system.
What is the secret behind the rise of the Chinese revisionist ping-pong team? The answer is simple: it is based on the openly promoted “small, clever, difficult, female, few” principles. “Small” refers to the use of small balls, as the small-ball projects are mostly niche and obscure, and compared to the large-ball projects like football and basketball, which are heavily invested in by imperialist powers through commercial leagues, the competition is less fierce; “clever” refers to skill-based projects, which facilitate the use of fascist state machinery under the so-called “whole nation system,” mobilizing large numbers of lower- and middle-class athletes as sparring partners for a small elite, training them to imitate foreign rivals’ styles to “feed” them moves, sacrificing many athletes’ development opportunities to produce a handful of gold medal winners; “difficult” refers to high-difficulty events like gymnastics and diving, where fascist “whole nation system” overtraining can create advantages over Western imperialist countries that operate under bourgeois democratic systems with athletes training independently; “female” refers to women’s events, exploiting Western imperialist countries’ patriarchal culture—since women are economically dependent on men and have limited space for sports development, and because men’s consumption capacity is generally higher, sports capital tends to focus on male-dominated sports like basketball, football, baseball, rugby, etc., while investing less in women’s events—further intensifying fascist education of Chinese female athletes through physical and mental destruction to achieve short-term skill gains and defeat Western female athletes who are less willing to endure hardship and have less capital investment; “few” refers to the small number of participants, allowing capital to be concentrated on cultivating a few “elite” bourgeois athletes rather than spreading resources too thinly across many.
In summary, just as emerging imperialist powers tend to enter new sectors that old imperialist powers avoid, adopting advanced production technologies to achieve overtaking, China’s revisionist sports also attempts to rely on entering niche projects that old imperialist powers avoid, using fascist weak-and-strong, layer-by-layer oppression training methods to surpass them.
As a sport historically undervalued by Western imperialism, table tennis naturally meets all five criteria of “small, clever, difficult, female, few,” and has thus become a major focus of Chinese revisionist support. Relying on brutal fascist training methods, high bonuses, high salaries, and high treatment, as well as the neglect of this “small project” by other imperialist countries, China’s table tennis once seemed to “soar” in the field, boasting that it had become a “sports power,” claiming this as proof.
However, on the other hand, China’s political and economic system is extremely rotten. As a reactionary social imperialist country, China operates under a highly monopolized bureaucratic capitalist system, and its political system is a revisionist fascist dictatorship. Therefore, the purpose of developing sports in China is not to genuinely improve the physical fitness of the people or enhance sports skills but to use sports competitions as a means to extract political capital, promote the “superiority theory” of Chinese revisionist social imperialism and the Chinese nation, and contribute to the “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation with chauvinism. Internally, it dulls the masses with chauvinism; externally, it propagates the legitimacy of its colonial and imperialist activities. The athletes bought by China are not serving the people; their only goal is to gain fame and fortune in competitions, living extravagantly on the scraps awarded by the regime. They do not focus on improving sports skills but engage in “championshipism,” treating winning medals as the only concern. If cheating, deception, and underhanded methods can help them win, no matter how vile, despicable, or dirty, they will use them extensively. Why did Wang Chuqin, once praised to the heavens, fail? It has long been pointed out that many of Wang’s victories relied on rogue tactics like “blocking shots”, and when opponents became aware of his tricks and guarded against his crooked methods, the lack of genuine skill meant he could only face defeat. Moreover, Chinese revisionist ping-pong players are obsessed with making the ball and their playing style “advantageous,” from how to make paddles more “useful”, to secretly adding expanding agents into glue on paddles to increase elasticity. When a sports team degenerates to the point where they no longer focus on the advantage of sports skills but rely on cheating tricks that are easy to imitate and require no effort, their hope of victory is placed on factors like opponents failing to notice their increasingly obvious dirty tricks or being unable to crack their sordid methods. Clearly, under the route of championshipism, Chinese revisionist ping-pong has already taken opportunism and chance as its reliance, heading down a lightning-fast path in sports, but relying on such gambling-like tactics as the basis for victory is doomed to failure.
Furthermore, within the bureaucratic monopoly bourgeoisie of China’s sports bureau, various open and covert struggles are also underway. Different factions use their bought bourgeois athletes as bargaining chips in their struggles, considering their wins and losses as political capital to attack rival bureaucratic monopoly capital groups. They fiercely oppose their opponents’ athletes’ victories and try every means to push their own athletes onto the podium. From the bureaucratic monopoly bourgeoisie to coaches and athletes, the Chinese ping-pong team is not united but fractured. Under such division, athletes preoccupied with conspiracy and intrigue have no energy to focus on honing their skills. Therefore, claiming that these athletes lost because of “poor form” is partly “unfair,” although their failure is not due to physiological reasons or mysterious “mental state,” but because they are busy scheming and have no intention of playing seriously.
Moreover, since money is their only motivation for participating in sports, sports itself loses its meaning. For bourgeois athletes, their pursuit is nothing but money, fame, and status convertible into money. If abandoning sports and giving up genuine sports skills can bring more money, they will do so without hesitation. Today, how many bourgeois athletes in China have shown their ugliness just to enjoy a luxurious life? Some are like the long-distance runners who prefer doping over training, like the Ma’s Army; others like Zhang Jike, who can’t compare a paddle to a deck of cards; Wang Chuqin, who prefers blocking shots to catching balls; Guo Jingjing, who performs “immortal jumps” in diving; and others like the Chinese football team, Qin Haiyang, Wu Liufang, etc. These bourgeois athletes can temporarily compete for titles and gold medals, but how many truly dedicate their lives to improving sports skills? After early retirement, they indulge in decadence. Even if they win world championships, how many bourgeois world champions have contributed to continuous innovation in sports techniques or to the physical fitness of the working people? It is clear that China’s bourgeois sports, under the guidance of championshipism and profit-oriented priorities, are already in decline. They once boasted loudly but achieved little truly great, and now they can’t even sing anymore.
Stalin once said, “History shows that invincible armies have never existed, and never did in the past.”[1] China’s revisionist ping-pong team, like the once rampant fascist Japanese invaders who ignited the flames of invasion across the Pacific, is also bound to fail. Once, the fascist Japanese invaders launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, occupying the entire Pacific, but suffered a crushing defeat at Midway, leading to their inevitable demise. China’s ping-pong team’s successive failures are not only a turning point for its decline but also a crucial sign of its sports career’s failure. Moreover, these failures have even more significant implications: sporting failures mean political and economic failures for China, as they are merely consequences of China’s political and economic failures. It is not the end of China’s defeat but the beginning of a series of failures to come. The entire fascist edifice of China will soon face a similar collapse as its sports.
Stalin: “Broadcast Speech (July 3, 1941),” in Stalin: Complete Works, Volume XVI, Zhuxia Huaisi Press, 2015. ↩︎