China prepares to show off its progress toward openness at the 2008 summer Olympics

STORY BY TARA MALONE AND KARA SPAK | Daily Herald Staff Writers
PHOTOS BY PATRICK KUNZER | Daily Herald Photographer

At Beijing’s Wukesong Culture and Sports Center, workers build scaffolding on the site where basketball and baseball games will be held for the 2008 summer Olympics

BEIJING — Whack! Woosh! Thwap!

Throughout China, the barely audible sounds are everywhere — the noise of 40 mm plastic ball blasted between two paddles held tight with determination.

Walk a bit in any Chinese neighborhood and you’ll see people, old and young, male and female, crowded around a table tennis table.

Table tennis, known here as ping pang qui, is China’s national sport.

That sport, and the country that dominates it, will go prime time in 833 days during the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games.

Having spent much of the 20th century in isolation, this will be Communist China’s chance to reshape its world image and show itself as a more open nation.

No expense is being spared to get this city, its residents and the country’s athletes in tip-top shape by 2008 as construction cranes and Olympic billboards all over Beijing attest.

“It will be an excellent chance for Beijing to showcase China to the world,” says Sun Weide, deputy communications director for the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, who surrendered his diplomatic post in Washington, D.C., to participate in what he calls a “lifetime chance.”

In 2008, this Beijing neighborhood known as Wukesong will host baseball and basketball players from around the world. Now, the area is just a flurry of construction.

833 days

Cheers, applause and national anthems will ring out in the Wukesong neighborhood in Beijing, a part of the city housing several Olympic venues.

For now, only the buzz of hammers, saws and cranes are heard as 2008 Olympic organizers race the clock to prepare.

Here, construction laborers are hard at work on the 18,000-seat basketball arena where national hero and Shanghai native Yao Ming, who now plays for the Houston Rockets, will come home to play.

The skeleton of a baseball stadium can be seen nearby, a stadium where the next Hideki Matsui, Juan Uribe or Johnny Damon might square off.

Much remains to be done before the first pitch or tipoff.

But much has been accomplished already, in part because work began July 14, 2001, a day after Beijing won the bid to host the 2008 summer games.

As a condition of hosting, the city needs to improve its dismal air quality and overcrowded roads, buses and subways.

Taking 300,800 diesel-driven city buses off the streets helps. Relegating manufacturing factories to the outskirts of Hebei province also is in the works, Weide said.

Four new subway lines should help move the estimated 500,000 foreign and 1 million Chinese visitors. A third airport terminal also will help ease the flow of the 60 million passengers expected to travel through the Beijing International Airport.

“At the end of the day,” Weide says, “it’s the people in the Chinese capital who will benefit the most.”

Just as China is making extraordinary efforts to build 11 new event venues, clean up its air and dramatically increase its public transportation, its athletes are working harder than ever toward one goal: winning gold medals.

China no longer is content to trail the United States and Russia in the medal count, as it did after making its best showing ever in the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Chinese athletes nudged out Russian competitors when it came to gold, winning 32 trips to the top tier of the medal stand, and trailed Americans by only three gold medals.

On their home turf, they hope to break records. Olympic training camps already are in full swing.

“We are advancing very fast in terms of sports,” Weide says.

China clearly has dominated one sport since its introduction at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. Chinese table tennis players have won 26 Olympic medals, 13 of them gold.

Wu Xiangrong, 23, plays table tennis in a community park on a mild night in Toisan, in southern China. Table tennis is China’s national sport.

The sport

The room erupts in a flurry of neon orange balls. They fly off the table tennis paddles of young students firing off backhands in a Naperville strip mall.

At the center of the fluorescent cascade is coach Xinai Ge, a slight woman with lightning fast hands.

With studied precision gained from 44 years of practice, Ge bounces then hits a ball every other second to the same spot on the far side of the table.

Her talent at the net was spotted when she was 8 years old in China’s central Hunan province. Ge scored her way onto China’s national team by the time she was 20.

Five world championship titles followed, and with that, a spot in the International Table Tennis Hall of Fame.

Chinese winners of the table tennis world championships are practically ensured national hero status.

Now, in the Naperville dance studio that doubles as a table tennis arena for an hour every Sunday at the Xilin Association, Ge trains a new generation of local players.

Ge’s dozen young proteges — boys and girls, tall and short, of different ethnic backgrounds — are devoted, but none benefit from the fierce competition and training intrinsic to the game in China.

“They maybe play one or two times a week,” Ge says. “This is not enough, especially to compete with athletes in China and Europe.”

Doorman He Hulin, 19, stands in the lobby of the Hua Bei Grand Hotel in Beijing, the epicenter for journalists covering China’s preparations for the 2008 Olympics. Beijing will become the third Asian city ever to host a summer Olympics.

Ge and other suburban table tennis advocates hope youngsters’ mild curiosity will build to a passion by Aug. 8, 2008, when the Beijing games begin. Then, suburban table tennis proteges might learn what could await them in 2016, the year Chicago officials have toyed with the idea of trying to host the Olympics.

“If we had a U.S. kid who could be in the Olympics, which is maybe four or eight years out, it would really drive interest,” says Phil Moy, a U.S. Association of Table Tennis coach and owner of a table tennis store in Itasca. “Everyone wants to be like their national heroes.”

Zheng-Tian Lu, a Chinese immigrant who lives in Naperville, hopes the Beijing games will spur interest in the sport he says is akin to basketball for Americans. Then maybe he can see more table tennis on TV. His TiVo now picks up a measly one or two table tennis games a month.

“I think people just haven’t seen professional play on TV enough so they don’t realize how competitive play can be,” says Zheng-Tian, an Argonne National Laboratory physicist who grew up playing table tennis in public parks around his native Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai.

Zheng-Tian first saw Ge play more than three decades ago on Chinese television as she won the world championship against a North Korean player.

Today, he watches her fire balls at his son, Peter.

Under Ge’s tutelage, Peter’s skills at the net likely will surpass Zheng-Tian’s own. He hopes Peter will be among a new wave of homegrown talent in the United States. The Beijing Olympics, he said, could help the cause.

“It’d be like learning basketball from Michael Jordan,” Zheng-Tian says.

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