Chen Yi Sweeps Harimoto Miwa 3–0 to Reclaim the Asian Title Japan Took From China Three Days Earlier
Three days after Japan beat China's women in the Asian Championships team final, 21-year-old Chen Yi defeated Harimoto Miwa 11-5, 11-8, 11-6 for the singles title — her first win over Harimoto after four straight losses.
On Saturday evening at the 2026 Asian Table Tennis Championships, Chen Yi beat Japan's Harimoto Miwa 11-5, 11-8, 11-6 to win the women's singles title — putting back in Chinese hands a trophy Japan had taken from China at team level only three days earlier. Reaching the final, Harimoto had staged the tournament's defining comeback, overturning a two-game deficit against Kuai Man to win their semifinal 3-2.
For Chen Yi, the week had been as harsh as a week gets. In Thursday's team final, which Japan won 3-2, she dropped two of her matches; the next day she and her partner lost the mixed doubles final to Harimoto and Matsushima Sora, the teenager whose rise has put a Japanese player at world No. 1 for the first time in 46 years. Worse still, she arrived at the singles final having lost four consecutive matches to Harimoto.
"Everyone believed in me more than I believed in myself," she told the streaming platform Migu Sports after the match, adding that the tournament "was an enormous exercise for me." She described going into the final determined to be decisive on every third ball — the kind of tactical bluntness that four straight defeats tend to teach.
Chinese fans registered the symmetry immediately. In the team final Harimoto beat her; in the singles final she returned the favour 3-0, as one fan put it, "settling the score with a 3-0 of her own."
The win mattered beyond the scoreboard. China's men came within one match of exiting the singles draw entirely — Wen Ruibo fell 0-3 to Harimoto Tomokazu in his semifinal, leaving no Chinese man in the final — and the team defeat on Thursday had already been billed at home as an alarm about Japan's next generation. A singles gold, won by beating the player who caused the alarm, was the answer China's table tennis establishment most wanted to give.
By nightfall the ledger had partly rebalanced: Kuai Man and Wang Yidi beat Harimoto and Hayata Hina 3-1 in the women's doubles final. Within a week of losing the team title, China held both women's titles at the tournament again — the singles one carried there by a player who, a week ago, had lost to everyone she now beat.