China's Table Tennis Team Is Losing Titles at Its Own Grand Smash

The scoreboard at Beijing's Shougang Park has been unkind to the hosts this week. On Friday, France's Lebrun brothers beat Wen Ruibo and Yuan Licen 3-1 in the men's doubles semifinal, removing China's last pair from the draw. Earlier in the tournament, no Chinese combination reached the mixed doubles semifinals at all. The arithmetic, as China's sports boards have been tallying it since Friday, is stark: two titles have already escaped the hosts before the finals begin.

The singles draws still carry Chinese names, but fewer than a home crowd expects. Zhou Qihao, who beat South Korea's Jang Woojin 4-2 in the quarterfinals, is the only Chinese man left. Wang Chuqin and Lin Shidong are among the stars who have withdrawn, and Sun Yingsha left earlier in the week after an upset loss that an emergency-room report turned into a national argument about athlete workloads. In the women's draw, Wang Yidi led Japan's Miwa Harimoto by two games on Friday night and then lost four straight to go out in the last eight. Wang Manyu, who dispatched Shin Yubin 4-0 — the final rally so good that the two opponents smiled at each other across the table, a clip Chinese social media has been replaying since — and Chen Xingtong are the hosts' remaining hopes.

Part of the fragility is medical, and the workload debate Sun Yingsha's exit opened has run alongside the results all week. Part of it is the tour's own arithmetic: as one widely read post weighing whether she could afford to withdraw put it — liked more than 9,000 times — the China Smash is the commercial flagship of the calendar, and once the biggest names step away, "the pressure concentrates on the stars who are left."

The other part is the crowd. Outside the players' walkway at Shougang Park, fans shouted at the men's head coach Wang Hao — demanding "Lin Shidong, play the singles!" — continuously enough that he eventually left the area and asked the police for help. The Chinese Table Tennis Association answered on October 7 with a promise to build a stadium ban list for abusive fans. The deeper argument, running on Zhihu all week, is generational: even Fan Zhendong's return, one sports analyst argued, "would help at the Los Angeles Olympics in the short term, but would not fix the gap in the talent pipeline" — the sense that the system's conveyor belt has slowed precisely while Japan's, which has just installed a teenager as the youngest-ever world number one, has not.

What remains of the home defence now runs through single threads: one man in the men's bracket, two women in the semifinals — Wang Manyu against Harimoto, Chen Xingtong against whichever of Zhu Sibing and Japan's Sato Hitomi survives their quarterfinal. The titles China has not yet lost are still there to be kept. The ones already gone were surrendered at home, in front of the sport's most demanding audience, and the questions they have set off will outlast the weekend.