Xinhua Asks What's Wrong With China's Men's Table Tennis Team
After Chinese men failed to reach the semifinals at Montpellier while Korea's Jang Woojin took the title, Xinhua published an unusually direct post-mortem: the men's team has a key-points problem, a thin bench behind its stars, and a fan culture that players say is part of the pressure.
The morning after China's men's table tennis team completed its worst WTT Champions event in memory, the country's official news agency published a question that would once have been unthinkable in its pages: "What's wrong with the men's team?"
At the Montpellier Champions tournament, which ended in the early hours of November 2 Beijing time, five Chinese men entered and three reached the quarterfinals. None reached the semifinals. The title went instead to Korea's Jang Woojin — his first WTT Champions crown, and the first at that level for any Korean player, a milestone Chinese outlets flagged as historic. The women, by contrast, swept the tournament's semifinal slots and took the title, as Sun Yingsha did at her previous stop.
The Xinhua essay, circulated by Red Star News, did not stop at the result. One loss does not define a team, it conceded — what must be guarded against is writing narrow defeats off as accidents. Montpellier exposed two structural gaps: the ability to win key points, and the depth of the ladder behind the core players when stars sit out. The generational transition, Xinhua allowed, is genuinely painful — but the foundation, the coaching and the players' fighting spirit remain sound.
The season's ledger gives the worry its weight. Across nine high-level WTT events this year, Chinese men have won exactly one singles title — Wang Chuqin's at the Singapore Smash. The other trophies went to Lin Yun-ju of Chinese Taipei, France's Félix Lebrun, Japan's Sora Matsushima and Tomokazu Harimoto, and Sweden's Truls Möregårdh. A generation that spent two decades vacuuming up silverware now finishes tournaments as spectators at the business end.
The sharpest commentary went past tactics to the atmosphere around the team. One widely shared essay argued that the invisible pressure source is fandom itself: when every rally is clipped, scored and litigated by fan armies online, players learn to fear the pile-on more than the opponent, and young Chinese players turn cautious on decisive points because a mistake makes them a target. Opponents, the essay noted, gamble on winners as routine — they have no pedestal to protect. A clip of the retired star Zhang Jike saying bluntly that the men's game has fallen technically behind also recirculated that night.
China's sports authorities have run campaigns against the "fan-ification" of national teams for two years, with limited effect on the traffic economy that feeds it. Xinhua's own closing line set the test: the players fly this week to Frankfurt for the season's last Champions event, and the measure of the post-mortem is whether lessons become results there.