As Injured Stars Withdraw from the WTT China Smash, Fans Urge Sun Yingsha to Rest Too

Two of China's biggest table tennis names pulled out of the WTT China Smash in Beijing on Wednesday, citing injury. Within hours, the argument had moved to the third one. Wang Chuqin and Lin Shidong withdrew and were replaced by lucky losers from qualifying; Sun Yingsha, the world No. 1 and the biggest draw in the sport, had not. Her fans wanted that to change — and the campaign they ran said a lot about what Chinese sports fans think their stars owe the machine.

Sun Yingsha comes to Beijing with a shoulder she has been taping all autumn. During the Asian Games in Nagoya she played three events — women's team, singles, mixed doubles — won them all against foreign opposition, and finished visibly emptied out. A widely shared post laying out her schedule called the workload "inhuman" and asked the team to plan her entries so she can recover; its author compiled a chart of nine months of mixed doubles entries tracing how the discipline's grind led to an injury that forced her out of four consecutive tournaments this summer.

The worry is not only medical. A long essay by the commentator Gao Shou, passed around tens of thousands of times across platforms, made the structural point: with Wang Chuqin and Lin Shidong out, the flagship event on home soil — the one that sells tickets, broadcast slots and sponsorships in the sport's biggest market — now leans on her. His argument was that her reliability has become her trap. Because Sun Yingsha has always played through it, everyone assumes she can play through it again: "she is the person who finds it hardest to simply withdraw." Withdrawals for others are read as self-care; for her, absence would be felt as a default on something.

There is no evidence WTT or the team has pressured her to play, and the essay said so plainly — "no one has said she cannot withdraw; that does not mean the pressure does not exist." The question resonates because it is the same one raised around Wang Chuqin's exhausting final Asian Games and around the fan culture Chinese table tennis has been trying to wind down: a sport whose stars are commercially indispensable is a sport that finds it hard to give them time off.

The Zhihu thread asking how to read the two withdrawals went up the same evening, and the consensus there mirrored Weibo's: gratitude for the two who stopped, anxiety about the one who has not. Whether Sun Yingsha plays Beijing is, in the end, a scheduling decision someone else could make for her — mixed doubles is the event fans most want deleted from her calendar, and it is the one the sport least wants to lose her from.