The Public War Over Liu Xiang's Post-Retirement Life: A Decade on the Books, and a Bitter Question

It started as a personal plea and has become a public accounting of one of China's most beloved athletes. Eleven years after retiring from track, hurdler Liu Xiang took to social media to ask what he should do after the Shanghai Athletic Bureau offered him two options: buy out his position, or come back to work as a coach. Then he added the line that turned the question into a fight: "It's been ten years, and now you remember to place me. Why didn't you place me properly when you were splitting my advertising fees?" (his post, as quoted in the commentary)

The bureau responded that Liu is a meritorious athlete and would be placed according to regulations, either through an organizational post or self-employment. But the public debate quickly moved beyond the two options and toward a harder question: what, exactly, has Liu Xiang's official status been for the past decade? New Beijing News argued that the public cannot judge the fight fairly because only two statements exist, from Liu and from the bureau. The details of what happened — whether this was truly a case of an athlete being pushed aside, or whether Liu continued to draw a salary while never reporting for work — have not been made public.

What is known comes from a widely circulated reconstruction that the Shanghai Morning Post and independent commentators have since been parsing. After his 2015 retirement, Liu was given a title of deputy secretary of the Communist Youth League committee at the Shanghai bureau: a part-time, non-sitting position with no administrative rank and no assessment, which he held for eleven years. His commercial career, meanwhile, continued. At his peak he had some twenty endorsement deals, and his annual advertising income around 2007 was reported at roughly 160 million yuan, with the bureau taking a cut. The structure, critics say, allowed him to keep the security of a state post while enjoying the income of a brand.

That is the fault line the commentary is now circling. Liu's defenders see the bureau's sudden "buyout or coach" ultimatum as a late and humiliating accounting, coming only after a disciplinary campaign began cleaning up staff members who remained on institutional rosters without ever appearing. His critics point out that other Olympic champions from the same generation — his fellow Shanghai native Wang Liqin, or the diver Wu Minxia — either reported for administrative work or left the system entirely. Liu, they say, took the security of a state post for eleven years without the obligations that came with it.

The argument is not really about the money. It is about the unresolved rule that let the arrangement exist in the first place. One widely shared commentary put the point directly: the buyout is said to start at around 1.5 million yuan, but the number is almost beside the point. What Liu is really asking, and what the public is now asking with him, is whether the rules were applied consistently — to him, to the bureau, and to the advertising money that was shared along the way.

This is a fight about more than one hurdler. It touches the wider system in which China's top athletes, trained by the state from childhood, are in principle entitled to a state placement when they retire. In practice, that placement has always been uneven, with superstars receiving honorary posts while ordinary athletes must find their own way. Liu Xiang's case, because he is Liu Xiang, has forced the question into the open: if the rules are only now being enforced, what happens to the years that came before?

The earlier round of this story is already on this site, when Liu Xiang first asked Weibo whether he should buy out his state coaching post. This second round is different: it is not about a choice, but about an accounting. The voice that made Liu Xiang a national symbol — the ordinary boy from Shanghai who cleared every hurdle — is now being tested by the most ordinary of Chinese adult problems, an unresolved personnel file. Only this time, the whole country is watching to see how he lands.