Two Retired Chinese Table Tennis Players Are Feuding in Livestreams Over a 25-Yuan Lesson

Liu Dingshuo spent his national-team years in the shadow of champions, and this week he went viral by picking a fight with one of them. On a livestream, the retired player accused Zhang Jike — the fastest man ever to complete table tennis's Grand Slam, in 445 days — of "trading on seniority" (倚老卖老) and of destabilizing the private coaching market with 25-yuan introductory classes, a price smaller academies cannot match. Zhang Jike's rebuttal, delivered on his own stream, was dismissive enough to become a headline of its own: Liu "isn't at my level" — the phrase he used, 段位不够, borrows the language of board games, meaning not enough dan to sit at this table — and he "couldn't be bothered to even acknowledge him." Within a day, three separate phrases tied to the row had charted on Weibo's trending board.

The quarrel is really about the afterlife of a Chinese sports career. Retired national-team players have long moved into coaching; livestreaming has turned that into mass-market fan service, where a superstar's fame converts into thousands of paying beginners at pocket-change prices. Liu's argument is that this crushes the ordinary coaches who need the same students. His supporters note the market was already competitive before a Grand Slam winner entered it; his critics answer that cheap classes grow the sport's base, and that Liu's real grievance is irrelevance.

Liu gave the fight a second front in another clip, describing the national team as "a warm, big family" — while observing that "there are always one or two individuals who won't pull together" (总有个别人不团结). Listeners read that as aimed at Zhang Jike, and the sarcasm was immediate. One Weibo user replied: "I couldn't tell you who the disunited ones in the big family are. All I know is the united one has flown off to Germany" — a nod to Fan Zhendong, the team's biggest active star, who has taken his own road to a club career in Düsseldorf.

Then the pile-on widened into a referendum on Liu himself. A widely shared recap reminded readers of his most famous moment on a world stage: smirking courtside while Fan Zhendong trailed in an Olympic singles final, a clip that has followed him ever since. Another commenter ran the record in detail: Zhang Jike fought his way past Wang Hao, Wang Liqin and Ma Lin on the way up, nobody dared to draw him in the internal qualifiers, and he came within one Rio final of a second career Grand Slam. "Check the record," the user wrote, "before you talk about whose peak was short."

Liu, for his part, told viewers he had deleted the "green bubble" — WeChat — and few doubted whose contact was gone; the two men came up through the same provincial program in Shandong before either wore the national flag.

The row is the third week running that Chinese table tennis has trended for something other than play, after fans were detained for heckling a coach and Japan's Mima Ito left her national team without a word. What no post in this dispute shows is any institution: no club, no association, no federation appears anywhere in the argument. In the livestream era, the sport's internal disputes get settled not by its governing bodies but by whoever retires with the larger audience.