China's Sports School: Crazy for Gold

By Hannah Beech/Weifang

A year ago, a slender girl called Cloud had no idea she would dedicate her life to lifting disks of iron above her head. Then a stranger came to her remote village in eastern China's Shandong province, took detailed measurements of her shoulder width, thigh length and waist circumference--and announced she would have the honor of serving her motherland as a weight lifter. The then 14-year-old daughter of vegetable farmers had little choice in the matter. She had been chosen to be a cog in China's vast sports machine, a multibillion-dollar apparatus designed with one primary goal in mind: churning out Olympic gold medalists.

Today Chen Yun (yun means cloud) trains at the Weifang City Sports School, one of 3,000 state-run athletics academies that consign nearly 400,000 youngsters to a form of athletic servitude. Sitting under the watchful eyes of her coach and a man who identifies himself as the school's "propaganda director," Cloud tells me that weight-lifting is her favorite sport. Any hobbies? I ask. "Weight-lifting," she answers. Anything Cloud likes besides weight-lifting? "Weight-lifting," she repeats. I try again. Cloud glances at the two men near her. Behind them is a poster of Chairman Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic and architect of China's state sports system. "Once, I liked to run in the fields near my village," she begins softly. The propaganda official steps in. "But now, she prefers weight-lifting," he says. "Her goal is to become a star athlete and make China proud." Cloud looks down at her callused hands, which can thrust 35 kg into the air but are now shaking from nerves. "I prefer weight-lifting now," she says. "I want to become a star athlete and make China proud."

Pride is a difficult concept to quantify, but for China, the Olympics provide a simple calculation for its ascent. Two decades ago in Seoul, China won just five golds. By 2004 in Athens, the country's 32-medal gold rush was second only to that of the U.S. Now China is hoping its home-turf advantage in Beijing will vault it into first place. If the People's Republic succeeds, the controversies over protests in Tibet, arms for Darfur, Steven Spielberg's pulling out as adviser to the Games--all that loss of face to date will have been worth it. It will also be a balm for a nation still hurting from the death of 70,000 in the May 12 earthquake.

For most Chinese, victory in Beijing will not only prove their country's status as a potential superpower but also erase its historic humiliation by colonial powers. Stupefied by opium, cowed by Western firepower, China was dismissed at the outset of the 20th century as the "sick man of Asia." Indeed, the first article Chairman Mao ever published was on the importance of sporting success to the national psyche. "Our nation is wanting in strength," he fretted back in 1917. "If our bodies are not strong, how can we attain our goals and make ourselves respected?" Winning, Mao and his followers deemed, would be a fitting way for a vanquished empire to avenge itself.

Sport is hardly the only arena in which China aims to be faster, higher and stronger. A little more than three decades ago, the People's Republic was an isolated, agrarian nation whose closest international ally was Albania. Today China is making new partners around the world as it vies with the U.S. and Europe in the race to gobble up markets and natural resources. Its trade with Africa and Latin America has increased sixfold since 2001. It is the world's top consumer of cement, grain, meat, coal, copper and steel. Back at home, China has transformed itself into a nation of superlatives, each record burnishing its reborn pride. The country boasts the world's biggest dam (the Three Gorges), the largest corps of engineers (350,000 new graduates every year) and the most urban areas with a population above 1 million (more than 100). The People's Republic is the most wired nation on earth (215 million--plus netizens) and has enjoyed one of the longest sustained economic expansions in history (three decades of on average nearly 10% annual growth).

Chinese diplomats insist their homeland's ascent shouldn't threaten the rest of the world. They characterize China's emergence as a "peaceful rise," a cuddly if rather dissonant phrase. But no amount of diplomatic niceties can cloak state-funded efforts to win, especially when individual freedoms are suppressed for the greater national good.

Take sports. After Beijing won the right seven years ago to host the 2008 Olympics, the country's State General Administration of Sports unveiled a Cabinet-approved policy called "Winning pride at the Olympics." The program built on China's long-standing "Gold-medal strategy" of targeting sports that offer the most Olympic golds because of different weight classes or race lengths. (Fencing, for instance, holds 10 golds, while canoeing/kayaking has 16.) It didn't matter that most Chinese knew nothing of these sports. The point was to accumulate gold medals. Women's sports, which tend to receive less funding in the West, received a cash infusion. Around the same time, the nation's athletics czars started the "119 project," which aimed for success in the few remaining disciplines in which the country was still weak. By the Sports Ministry's count, 119 gold medals (now 122) were up for grabs in water sports and track-and-field events. Why shouldn't China share in the bounty?

China is hardly the only country to build a national sports machine. In fact, the nation's athletics factories were modeled after the old Soviet-style system, which during the cold war churned out limber Romanian gymnasts and a fleet of doped-up East German swimmers. But the East bloc is long gone--and with it, sports by diktat. Today China is one of the few nations, apart from the likes of North Korea and Cuba, to commit so many state resources to athletics. While some young Chinese choose to attend sports schools, others, like Cloud, are little more than pawns of the state.

The Cost of Gold

If it weren't for the Beijing Olympics, China's sports system might have become liberalized the way the rest of Chinese society has. For more than two decades, the People's Republic boycotted the Olympic movement to protest rival Taiwan's participation. When China finally rejoined the Games in 1980, the sports-school system was expanded to ensure that Chinese athletes would do their country proud. For many parents, securing three bowls of rice a day for their offspring was enough to convince them that the grueling training was worth it. But by the '90s, with the economy opening up, fewer families were willing, say, to send their daughters to train as weight lifters when they could study computer science instead. After all, for every Olympic champion the sports academies produce, hundreds of thousands of other children fail. Most of these kids miss out on the education provided in regular schools. The China Sports Daily estimates that about 80% of the country's retired athletes are plagued by unemployment, poverty or chronic health problems resulting from overtraining.

But with Beijing 2008, the sports system has gone into overdrive. After 2001, the annual budget for the Sports Ministry increased to $714 million, from $428 million the year before. "With the Olympics in Beijing, we want to make sure we do very well," says Hao Qiang, head of the Sports Ministry's competition-and-training department. "Otherwise, the public will be very disappointed that we did not display proper national spirit." It's a pricey endeavor: each of China's gold medals will cost the state upwards of $7 million, according to Bao Mingxiao, director of the Sports Ministry's Institute of Physical Science. At the Qingdao City Sports School, one of the country's top breeding grounds of Olympic athletes, principal Qiao Xiangdong credits Beijing 2008 for spurring the local government to build a new $30 million campus for his 600 students. "Before, some parents were worried about sending their kids to sports schools because they thought their children would have to eat too much bitterness," Qiao says, using the Chinese term for enduring hardship. "But the Beijing Olympics has made people willing to contribute to the nation's glory."

China's athletics achievement is all the more impressive given that it isn't a very sporty nation. I remember jogging in Beijing several years ago only to have people look behind me to see whom I was running away from. But China's leaders have a long tradition of using sports as a spur to national pride. Consider the country's decades-long dominance of table tennis. This supremacy had little to do with a national passion for wooden paddles and plastic balls. China decided to develop star paddlers largely because the International Table Tennis Federation was, in 1953, one of the first sports organizations to drop ties with Taiwan in favor of the mainland. In 1959, Rong Guotuan made history as China's first world champion in any sport. Mao deemed the victory a "spiritual nuclear weapon." Determined to maintain Ping-Pong supremacy, coaches fanned out across the countryside looking for kindergartners with quick reflexes and superior hand-eye coordination. "Other countries have produced some really good table-tennis players," says Liu Fengyan, director of China's table-tennis administrative center. "But without a sports system like China's, their success ends when those athletes retire."

This single-minded drive explains why China has full-time academies dedicated to what most countries consider a rec-room pastime. At the Luneng Table-Tennis School in Shandong province, 230 boarding students crowd a gymnasium set up with 80 Ping-Pong tables. In the morning, children train for about four hours. A few hours of academic classes are held in the afternoon, more than at many other sports schools. Three times a week, students hone their table-tennis skills also in the evening. Many kids see their parents for only a couple of weeks each year. "China's so good at Ping-Pong because we train harder than anyone else," says Xu Mengjie, a pigtailed 10-year-old standing under a giant banner that exhorts fight for your country. "I always feel like I need to work harder because that's the only way I can become an Olympic champion."

China's table-tennis success inspired the country's sports officials to apply the same model to medal-rich Olympic disciplines. In addition to diving, in which the Chinese won six of an available eight gold medals in Athens, the country is now a powerhouse in weight-lifting and shooting, neither of which was a popular event before the sports bureaucrats got involved. China's first Taekwondo national team was formed in 1995, when officials noticed that few athletes outside of South Korea competed in the martial art. Five years later, in Sydney, China won an Olympic gold in the sport. The first canoeing gold, which China won in Athens, arrived within three years of putting serious resources into the sport.

Driven to Succeed

The push for medals can compel kids to suddenly start training in sports they didn't know existed before the coaches came calling. Last year Ding Liyan lined up with other students in his junior high school class to perform a peculiar test given by an official from the Qingdao City Sports School. He was asked to spread his palm and stack as many .22-cal. bullets on top of one another as he could. Ding managed a tower of eight--a feat of nervelessness, a quality essential in a competitive archer. "We're only interested in children who can pile up more than six bullets," says Qingdao archery coach Qu Yuefeng, who ticks off other attributes she requires in potential students: wide shoulders, a calm demeanor and good vision. Ding fulfilled every requirement, even though he admits he's not a "very sporty boy." Training is often dull. In his first year at the school, the 14-year-old has been allowed to work on only one major aspect of archery: the release of the bowstring. But Ding isn't complaining. The Qingdao school has nice dorm rooms, helps students get into college and employs coaches who understand the virtues of rest and recovery time.

At most other Chinese sports schools, suffering is considered integral to the athletic experience. At the Weifang City Sports School, where little Cloud is being trained to be a weight lifter, most of the kids are so chronically exhausted that during their afternoon break, they collapse in eight-to-a-room iron bunks to sleep. The Weifang academy is a collection of moldy concrete buildings, with only red socialist banners to break the monotone grays. LEARN FROM OUR COMRADES AND CREATE A NEW AND GLORIOUS OLYMPICS, urges a slogan in the weight-lifting gym. Taped to a wall nearby are rows of so-called self-criticism essays that the girls have written assessing their own performances. "I must try much harder," says Cloud's paper. "I do not want to disappoint." Some practice rooms are lit by just one low-wattage bulb, while the dormitories reek of urine and sweat. There isn't a blade of grass on any of the school's athletic fields. Not that we are allowed to photograph anything the propaganda director considers "inferior aspects" of the school. Other aspects deemed unfit for photography include tattered wrestling mats, an 11-year-old student mopping a gym floor with chilblained hands, even a formation of preteen sharpshooters marching by with rifles propped on their shoulders.

The propaganda director assures us that the kids practice for only a couple of hours a day. But students I speak to without a minder present say they train for at least five hours. None of the dorm rooms I visit have any textbooks--strange for a school that the propaganda director tells me is "mostly for academics, with sports training just as a spare-time activity." Wang Ting, a 15-year-old runner, looks at me blankly when I ask what she does during her time off. "I run, and I sleep," she replies. "That's my day."

An Inferiority Complex

The train-till-you-drop mentality derives, in part, from a physical-inferiority complex that's taken as fact in Chinese sports circles. "Chinese bodies are not as naturally strong as those of people from other countries," says Qingdao school principal Qiao, repeating what I am told by Sports Ministry officials. "But we can work harder than anyone else. That's our biggest advantage." Chinese women, in particular, are renowned for their ability to withstand brutal training. Unlike in the U.S., where the privatization of athletics means less money for women's sports--just compare the NBA with the WNBA--the Chinese state lavishes funds on its female athletes from childhood onward. Mao used to say, "Women hold up half the sky." In fact, four years ago in Athens, Chinese women did even better, winning 60% of the country's gold medals.

Then there are the less honorable methods China has used to cultivate sporting success. Just before the Sydney Games, when antidoping officials announced they would be administering a new test for the synthetic endurance booster erythropoietin, the Chinese Olympic squad was suddenly pruned about 10%. Six years earlier, at the Asian Games, 11 Chinese athletes were caught doping. Of course, athletes from other countries cheat too--witness U.S. track star Marion Jones' downfall. But there's a difference between individuals making the choice to dope and kids unknowingly swallowing whatever their sports-school coaches give them, which is what several retired Chinese athletes allege. The Sports Ministry vows that China will be clean in Beijing. But it's not clear whether the same commitment exists on the lower rungs of the sports system, where funding is based on results in national competitions. Two years ago, a sports school in northeastern Liaoning province was busted for routinely injecting students with steroids.

The last thing the Chinese government wants is a doping scandal on home soil. About $20 billion is being spent on Olympics-related preparations. But even though seven years of Olympics priming has only heightened Chinese hopes for domination, sports officials in recent weeks have scaled back expectations of a record gold-medal harvest. In March, the deputy head of the Sports Ministry cautioned that China didn't expect to surpass the U.S. The modesty may have been tactical. For Athens, Chinese sports officials put their target at just 20 gold medals. In fact, China won 32. Nearly 60% of China's total medal count came from young Olympians, many of whom will be in their prime in Beijing.

The brightest of these stars is Liu Xiang, a 110-m hurdler whose world-record-breaking sprints disprove the notion that Chinese bodies are somehow inferior to foreign ones in high-piston sporting events. (After winning a gold in Athens, Liu said his "victory has proved that athletes with yellow skin can run as fast as those with black and white skin.") When I met Liu shortly before Athens, I was struck by his individualism; unlike many Chinese Olympians who didn't choose their sporting careers, Liu actually liked hurdling. Although he did mumble some variation of the patriotic theme, it was clear he was also chasing after his own glory. "Because of the sports system, Chinese athletes are tied to the state," he told me. "But I think it's better to be like the West, where athletes are liberated." Back then, Liu had experienced a few elements of freedom: he had no curfew and enjoyed unlimited access to the Internet.

Since Athens, Liu has been marketed as a national hero, but sports officials have taken a chunk of his advertising revenues as payback for developing his career. Although the Shanghai native's famous grin beams from thousands of billboards across China, he appears less cheery these days. He has been publicly chastised by sports officials for allowing "social activities"--a catchall for anything from commercial shoots to the occasional night of karaoke--to get in the way of his training. The pressure to win is almost unimaginable: a recent Internet survey found that the Chinese public's No. 1 Olympics wish was for Liu, 24, to strike gold. Four years ago, Liu surprised me with his rebel streak. "The thing about rules is that they are made by people," he said, "and they can be broken by people too." But with so much riding on the Olympics, China's government will do all it can to ensure that it is records, not rules, that will be broken in Beijing.