THE CHINA SYNDROME

Chinese athletes and coaches are increasingly subject to the ills and temptations that afflict sports in the West

by Alexander Wolff
Special Reporting by David Fleming and Jeff Lilley

Sports Illustrated October 16, 1995

Marco Polo had it just about right. "In heaven there is paradise," he reported to Kublai Khan, "and on earth there is Hangzhou." Seven centuries later, as dawn breaks, peace still envelops West Lake, the gemstone of Hangzhou, a provincial capital south of Shanghai. A concrete promontory is peopled by elderly women engrossed in tai chi chuan. Up a stairwell, beneath a shroud of trees, a middle-aged man incants a scale, his voice carrying over a nearby glade. Everywhere people are practicing one of the solitary recreation arts: fishing, cycling, stretching, shadowboxing. One man walks slowly backward, turning over worry balls in the palms of his hands.

On the surface this scene partly conforms to the Western notion of China as serene, inward-looking, hidebound. It's a beguiling and seductive tableau, and a completely misleading one. There's symbolism in that man who can't see where he's going; he may be fingering those worry balls for good reason. Economic liberalization under Deng Xiaoping has led to a welter of entrepreneurial activity and loosed the untidiness of capitalism on the Middle Kingdom. At the same time China has shed its reputation as the sporting sick man of Asia, the nation that sent a single athlete to the 1932 Olympics and passed up the Games entirely from '52 through '76.

As a shopping center informally called the Great Mall of the People goes up in Beijing less than a mile from Tiananmen Square, change is touching virtually every aspect of Chinese sports, often adversely. A drug scandal at the 1994 Asian Games in Hiroshima, where seven Chinese swimmers tested positive for anabolic steroids, threatens China's expectation of dominating aquatic events at the Atlanta Olympics. The dictatorial methods of Ma Junren, the coach whose "family army" of teenage women distance runners set Beamonesque records only two years ago, so alienated his athletes that they defected en masse. China's medal prospects in Atlanta are still good; this is, after all, a country where, when they tell you you're one in a million, you know there are a thousand more just like you. But the Chinese are discovering that there can be unintended consequences when the government pays a bonus of as much as $10,000 for an Olympic gold medal, when local sponsors and overseas Chinese millionaires ply winners with sums 10 to 12 times more than that, and when the August First soccer team, named after the date of the founding of the People's Liberation Army, is suddenly underwritten by Nike.

Welcome to China circa 1995. Death to running dogs and all that. But for that running boy or girl, get the best price possible.

To a people conditioned to taking cues from the Communist Party on how to think, Ma Junren must be terribly confusing, for there is no officially sanctioned opinion on the man whose runners have remaindered the track and field record book. Everyone freely chooses sides at the mention of his name. If China had a tabloid press, this millionaire celebrity, a two-fisted smoker with throat cancer who's part medicine man, part con man and part guru, would be Princess Di, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson rolled into one.

"I only know what I read in the newspaper," says Wei Jizhong, the general secretary of the Chinese Olympic Committee, when the subject of coach Ma is brought up. But Wei's demurral is coy, for upon reading the paper you'll find Wei's and other officials' voices everywhere, calling into question Ma's autocratic excesses and his obsession with money, even as they laud his runners' achievements.

Like the foot soldiers in his family army, Ma began life poor. He went on to raise pigs and work as a prison guard--occupations that serve him well now, cynics say. For his team he chose only the most destitute, simple, homely peasant girls, and he forbade them to wear their hair long or to have boyfriends. He berated the girls and, from a rickety motorcycle with a sidecar, led them on training runs that sometimes totaled more than a marathon a day. To help them recover he fed them elixirs made of turtle blood and caterpillar fungus. Then, the runners claim, he kept (temporarily, he says) their bonuses and the Mercedes-Benzes they won at the 1993 world championships.

Ma now lives in a three-story Spanish-style villa decorated with Buddhist statuary and no bookcases. "He is uneducated," people whisper. They say this with a hiss of sanctimony, for the Mandarin creed places learning above all, and the Chinese consider someone who has exalted the physical over the mental unworthy, if not incapable, of achieving great prosperity. Ma never writes anything down; the formulas for the herbal potions with which he washes his runners' feet and for the carefully calibrated schedule of their low- and high-altitude training are in his head.

In China before the 1949 revolution men bound the feet of young women to keep them from running off. But Masoon discovered that it's impossible to teach a girl to run and simultaneously tie her down. Early last December, fed up with Ma's methods and angry that he had withheld the fruits of their victories, 17 runners--including 10,000-meter world-record holder Wang Junxia--revolted, walking out of camp. Most did so with the support of their parents. But Ma was so essential to their success that without him, their performances have fallen off dramatically. Meanwhile Ma has become Svengali to a new crop of runners at a facility in Dalian built with at least some of the winnings of his erstwhile enlistees.

Believing his mother to be the goddess of deer, Ma recently took his new runners on a pilgrimage to her grave. That detail is said to be in a forthcoming book about Ma that may never be published, for its author isn't sure whether the authorities consider Ma worthy of canonization or of condemnation. China's take on this hybrid of Bobby Knight, Bela Karolyi and Timothy Leary is much like the country's attitude toward its new, ill-distributed prosperity: The Chinese are happy to claim the successes, but they are a little embarrassed by how these advances have come about.

"He uses dirty words," says Huang Zhihong, the former world champion in the women's shot put. "His girls have to do laundry for him and take food to him. But when they begin to know the world, they don't listen to him anymore. Fifteen years ago you could coach like this, because everyone was scared of coaches and of politics. But not now. Now if you don't like the coach, you can go someplace else."

Today the game that helped open up China during the Nixon era is the poor sister of Chinese sports. The World Table Tennis Championships, held in Tianjin in May, were swept by the home team, but they attracted so little corporate sponsorship that they rang up a huge loss. Meanwhile China is scarcely different from any other country outside the U.S. in its fervor for soccer. This season the 24 teams in China's two-year-old, IMG-affiliated pro league expect to draw 1.5 million fans. Recent visits by the European clubs Arsenal, A.C. Milan and Sampdoria drew sellout crowds, and in Shanghai last season local fans actually pelted followers of the visiting Chengdu club with bottles, albeit plastic ones. Because of the government's decree last spring that Saturday would join Sunday as a day off for all Chinese workers, soccer is likely to attract still more fans and young players.

Guo An, the Beijing team, is the current Chinese league leader. Coach Jin Zhiyang, a compact man of expressionless intensity, sits in his office next to the Workers' Stadium wearing Nike shoes, Nike warm-up pants and a Nike polo shirt. Only his watch, a visitor remarks, isn't beswooshed. "Does Nike make a watch?" Jin asks, in all seriousness, lest he miss out on something.

Jin is upset: Nike is tardy in delivering equipment included in its sponsorship agreement, and he must make do with a single set of uniforms when, he says, he has been promised five sets. But he knows there's a latter-day solution to this latter-day problem. "We're talking with Reebok right now," he says.

Several offices away, in a garret with a desk and a bed, Yang Qun works and lives. He is Guo An's vice general manager, an energetic, chain-smoking young man who has the oily charm of a car salesman. He has learned quickly what it has taken spendthrift Western sports barons many painful years to discover: Money alone can't buy titles. GuoAn has no foreign players, even though league rules permit five imports per club. "We believe we can beat any other team without them," Yang says. "So why bother?" And while a team in Guangzhou just spent $137,500 in transfer fees to buy two Chinese players, Yang isn't concerned. "They're doing very well, but they're not Number 1," he says. "We are!"

This isn't to say Guo An isn't above buying a player or two. Beijing's goalkeeper was lured there from a team in Hebei.

Yang shrugs. "Sixty years ago the most famous physicist, Einstein, was stolen by the U.S.," he says.

To curb China's breathtaking population growth, the state has enforced a strict single-child policy since 1981. With both parents lavishing attention and resources on their only offspring, the kid is likely to become a little terror with a dynastic sense of entitlement. This phenomenon is so widespread that it has a name: the Little Emperor Syndrome. At the Zhejiang Provincial Physical Education and Sports School in Hangzhou--one of the feeder schools that form the base of the pyramid of talent that produced 96% of the champions at China's most recent National Games--every gymnast is an only child. Every one, that is, except the best athlete in the class, Ning Bo, 9, whose twin brother attends art school. "My mother did not cry in front of me," he says of the scene at the beginning of the term when he was dropped off. "But of course she cried afterward, because I was leaving her."

And what of his twin brother? "I don't miss him," Bo says. "No, not at all. He misses me, but I don't miss him. "Uneasy rests the butt that shares a throne.

Jin Ronghu, the table tennis coach at the Zhejiang school, must deal with Little Emperors and Empresses every day .For years China banked on the ability of its spartan standard of living--and the attendant willingness of its athletes to suffer hardship, to chi ku, or "eat bitterness"--to temper future champions. Now, instead of chowing down on bitterness, young people clamor for seconds on dessert. "I have parents who drop their kids off and wait for them all day," says Jin. "When it's hot, they want to bring the kids extra to drink. I consider that pampering."

Lang Ping is perhaps the country's most famous product of "hard training." Under martinet coach Yuan Weimin,Lang, who was known as the Hammer for her merciless spiking, led the national volleyball team to four world titles during the 1980s and the gold medal at the '84 Olympics. Last February a Hong Kong businessman bought out Lang's lucrative contracts on the U.S. professional circuits so she could return to coach a national team that, during the '90s, has been a chronic disappointment. But as a coach the Hammer is a soft touch, a sort of anti-Ma who has distanced herself from some of the very techniques that once turned her into the greatest woman player in the world. Lang's players work hard, sometimes training eight and nine hours a day, 6 1/2 days a week. But they'll break to play soccer or basketball or attend a dance class, and they take the occasional day trip to the Great Wall. "I like to ask them what they think," Lang says. "I don't like players who just say yes all the time. Things are different now. Now you have to explain why you're asking them to do something."

As he speaks, Guo Qinglong gesticulates so emphatically and unrelentingly that you get the sense that if he were immersed in a pool, the secretary general of the Chinese Swimming Association could reset every record stripped from his swimmers for using drugs. Eleven Chinese swimmers were caught during 1993 and '94. That was more than half of all the positives that had turned up since drug tests in swimming began 23 years ago.

Are airborne insects to blame? Or bureaucratic cockroaches? Scams take place at the local level all over sporting China. At the Shanxi Provincial Games last summer, a swim team representing one prefecture won $5,000 in prize money before officials discovered that the team included impostors, ringers from another prefecture. All told, 54 provincial title winners were found to have false identity papers, and the closing ceremonies were canceled to spare everyone embarrassment. On the other hand, the protestations of China's top swimming officials echo those heard from the sport's most prodigious cheats, the East Germans, some of whose trainers have wound up in China. The Chinese experienced the same sudden rise to prominence as the East Germans; the same confinement of their success not simply to women but to women sprinters, for whom power is more important than technique; the same deep voices and strapping physiques among female swimmers; the same unexplained absences at certain competitions.

Swimming has a mythic place in post-revolutionary China. The day after Chairman Mao took a well-publicized dip in the Yangtze in 1956, thousands of people did the same thing. So there's additional sting to the country's loss of face at the Asian Games. After news broke of the positive tests, pictures of the disgraced swimmers appeared outside whorehouses in Hiroshima.

For a generally cloistered people, the Chinese have a surprising love for the foreign sport of basketball. Stanchions with backboards and hoops dot the countryside like mutant mushrooms. When NBA commissioner David Stern visited China a few years ago, as the Chicago Bulls were dominating basketball Stateside, he was introduced to a provincial official who brightened when informed of Stern's high office. "Ahhh!" the official said. "The Red Oxen!"

To the Chinese it isn't offensive to point out that they aren't particularly big or strong. It's a fact, one grasped so firmly by the Chinese Basketball Association that for a while league games took place with a shot clock shortened to 25 seconds (from the customary 30) to encourage players to take advantage of their natural quickness. Similarly, as recently as four seasons ago, players were awarded four points for every successful shot beyond the arc after their team's fourth three-pointer in a game. Market incentives, after a fashion.

China nonetheless has the slowest low-post player on earth. Six-foot, eight-inch, 250-pound Zheng Haixia was named MVP at the women's world championships in Australia a year ago, and she was the primary reason China beat out the U.S. for the silver medal. Zheng, 28, knows of Shaq and Hakeem, and she knows that being huge can lead to celebrity, and celebrity can lead to wealth. She says that contract offers from clubs in Italy, Sweden and Spain have been faxed to her through the basketball association, but they have never been delivered. Still she says she would like to play overseas after the Olympics in Atlanta. "It's important for us to get more publicity," she says. "It acknowledges your role in society and your contributions to the sport.

"One minute more," Zheng says, her patience wearing thin with a photographer who has prevailed on her to pose.

"Make an interview?" she says. "Make a photograph?" She knows the drill. "It is good for me. It is good for you."

And one more thing: "Can you send me clippings of your article?"

"How could Ma's army run a marathon a day without the aid of a drink to help them recover?" asks Lixiao Ping. "Ma's success proves we make quality fungus." Lixiao's entire being seems buffed to a shine, from his slicked-back black hair to his thick sunglasses to his synthetic-fiber business suit. He's general manager of Zhong Shan City League New Technology, manufacturers of Worm Hair King, one of Ma's famous elixirs, and he's happy to talk up his tonic to anyone who will listen.

The fungus in question comes from the rare dong qiong sya cao--literally, "winter bug, summer grass"--found almost exclusively in the up-country of the western provinces. After the caterpillar dies, a fungus grows on its carcass, and out of the fungus sprout long grasslike strands. The thick dark-brown extract from that worm hair is said to clear bronchial tubes and increase circulation, and that's what Lixiao's company provided gratis to Ma's army. "This is what I tell my girls to drink," the great coach said, holding up the potion after his runners shattered three world records at the 1993 National Games. But soon afterward Ma dropped Worm Hair King and struck a deal with a firm that makes something called China Turtle Essence. And in return for posing with his runners in front of a $70,000 Audi sedan, Ma got to keep the car and $50,000 in cash. Seven months later he signed with a company that makes herbal patent medicines, in exchange for $10 million and an ownership stake.

Ma's ingratitude leaves Lixiao sputtering. "We supported Ma when he was just a pig farmer," Lixiao says. "He should be full of shame. Ma is worse than a blind American capitalist. At least in America you must honor a contract. Advertising turtle drink. Ha!

"He forgot about being Chinese. According to our traditions, you should go to great lengths to do good things for people who help you. Yes, like your person O.J., people still always talk about this man Ma. But everything they are saying is bad."

It's not easy to walk away from Lixiao Ping and his testimonials to quality fungus. "If you are 60 years old and walk with a cane, drink 16 bottles and you will not need a cane anymore," he says.

"Why 16 bottles? I cannot tell you. It is a secret."

Lixiao is both beneficiary and victim of the Western ways infiltrating Chinese sport, but with that last pitch he reminds us that his country hasn't abandoned many time-tested Eastern ways. In Atlanta the world will have been forewarned: China has plenty of flies and mosquitoes, but it has its worms, too.