The New York Post wrote about the Chinese sports school system, stating, “It doesn’t matter if the sports have mass appeal or if the youngsters have an interest – if they are deemed worthy, it is their duty to perform for the sake of the nation.”
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged as a sports superpower challenging the United States. The two countries have very different systems.
In the US, sports programs are organic, allowing young people, with their parents’ consent, to decide whether and in which sports to train. If they choose, they compete through successive levels, from local to regional, national, international, and eventually the Olympic qualifiers.
In contrast, in the PRC, sports, like everything else from the economy to society, are centrally planned as part of a larger strategy for China to assert itself on the world stage. Consequently, the Communist Party of China views its athletes as expendable soldiers, the vast majority of whom will be sacrificed to achieve the state’s objective of winning Olympic gold. It is estimated that 80 percent of retired athletes end up with no education and/or disabled and jobless.
Unlike the US, which has an extensive system of scholastic and collegiate sports at public high schools and universities, Chinese schools generally do not have organised sports programs or teams. Instead, China relies on its sports school system to produce world-class athletes. This system includes between 2,000 and 3,000 live-in sports schools and hundreds of live-in martial arts schools, serving between 300,000 and 400,000 student athletes.
Manufactured
Local governments and talent scouts are tasked with testing children as young as six years old across the country to identify potential athletes and determine which sports they should pursue. The tests assess not only strength and stamina but also include X-rays and bone density testing, as well as measurements of hand size and the length of legs and arms. Similar assessments are conducted on the parents to see which children might have the necessary advantages for a particular sport.
Chinese professional basketball star Yao Ming, who played for the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA), is a genetic giant, standing 7 feet 6 inches (2.29 m) tall. His parents were both unusually tall — his father was 6’7″ and his mother 6’2″ — and both were high-level basketball players. It could be a coincidence that these two people found each other through their shared love of basketball, but it is also possible that Yao Ming was intentionally bred by the state.
At Shanghai University of Sport, where this author studied, many athletes were second-generation, the product of two selected athletes who married and had children. While it makes sense that people training at the same university would end up marrying, this is also part of the CCP’s plan to produce “super-sports-babies”. Encouraging genetically gifted individuals to marry others with similar traits borders on eugenics.
In recent years, DNA testing has been added to the athlete selection criteria. The CCP has been collecting DNA samples from citizens without permission to create the world’s largest genome database. They have gathered DNA from Mongols and Tibetans in hopes of creating “super soldiers” who can endure privations and combat at high altitudes, such as the conflict in Arunachal Pradesh between China and India. It is not a stretch to believe that China will begin, or has already begun, creating genetically superior athletes.
Once promising children are identified, they are given a spot in a sports school where they will live and train in a particular sport up to three times a day, six days a week, from first through twelfth grade.
In interviews with sports university students, they were asked if they had an interest in the sport they had spent the last 16 years practising prior to their selection. Most came from small, poor, rural communities where no one had ever heard of fencing and no one knew how to swim or wrestle. Unsurprisingly, almost none had any experience or knowledge of the sport they wound up studying, unless they were second-generation athletes.
Being selected meant growing up seeing their parents only once or twice a year. Theoretically, the athletes or their parents could have opted out, but they were told that the choice was for the good of the nation.
When you enter a Chinese sports school, you are immediately confronted by patriotic propaganda, with signs reading, “BE POSITIVE, WORK HARD, CLIMB THE HIGH MOUNTAIN, WIN GLORY FOR THE COUNTRY.” Schools and universities in China still have self-criticism boards, a throwback to the Cultural Revolution. At Weifang City Sports School, one of the boards read, “Learn from our Comrades and Create a New and Glorious Olympics.”
Beatings and other forms of abuse are extremely common, with many coaches carrying sticks to punish students whose performance fails to bring glory to the nation.
Precarious positions
The daily routine at sports schools varies, but generally includes two to three training sessions per day, along with an afternoon nap. Dinner follows the afternoon training, and then showers. By law, students must log three hours of academic classes per day, usually from 7 pm to 10 pm. After a full day of training, the exhausted athletes often sleep through their lessons, learning nothing.
Despite the poor education in sports schools, students still have to meet certain graduation requirements, which many fail to do either due to low academic levels or injuries. As a result, they often end up without even a high school diploma because they are academically unqualified to transfer to a standard government school.
