“
We have no heart for games, we just miss you, Liu Guoliang,”
several Chinese table tennis players and coaches simultaneously
tweeted on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, on
the night of June 23. Just three days previously, their head coach Liu
Guoliang was dismissed and transferred to an allegedly nominal post,
that of 19th deputy chairman of the Chinese Table Tennis Associa-
tion (CTTA), China’s highest non-governmental table tennis man-
agement organisation, under the General Administration of Sport
(GAS) of China, without any credible reason given.
According to the CTTA, Liu’s transfer was a part of its management
reform to cut personnel and increase efficiency. Netizens questioned
why Liu, a national player and coach with a brilliant track record who
was leading the national team to new heights, was sidelined.
To protest the sudden transfer, three national-level ping pong play-
ers and two coaches withdrew from the ongoing China Open on
June 23, followed by more players and coaches joining the protest
via Weibo.
The CTTA and GAS, however, remained silent in the face of
people’s demands for the detailed reasons of the reform, but rather
condemned the players’ withdrawal as individualism and indifference
toward the country’s interests.
On June 27, Liu himself wrote a long message on Weibo, claiming
that he supports the reform and that he should bear the responsibil-
ity for the walkouts of his players. But this was seen as his surrender
to the powers that be. Although the CTTA claimed in its statement
that the new post will help Liu play a bigger role in table tennis at the
national level, the public, constantly shut off from any information by
the government, is increasingly distrusting of the reform.Sudden Transfer
As a former first-tier national player and the first in China to win
a triple gold at the Olympic Games, the World Championships and
the World Cup, Liu Guoliang was appointed chief coach of the Chi-
nese men’s ping pong team in 2003 when he was only 27 years old.
During his tenure as the chief coach, and later the head coach of the
overall national ping pong team for men and women. Liu initiated
what the media called “the third wave of ping pong,” trying to ex-
pand ping pong’s influence by participating in various activities, both
commercial and governmental. Although his new idea sparked some
controversies, with some blaming him for “running irrelevant busi-
nesses,” Liu’s achievements were dazzling enough to refute his crit-
ics. Under his lead, the Chinese table tennis team won a great haul
of medals at various international fixtures and swept up all the gold
medals for table tennis at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.
Thanks to his efforts on and “under the table” in managing other
aspects of the sport, Liu and his favourite apprentices have become
popular sport stars among a growing number of netizens. Many fans
exclaimed that Liu was a remarkable coach, excelling in promoting
the sport as well as training young players.Following the Rio Olympic Games, Liu and his teams, both the
men’s and women’s, have been busy with international competitions
in order to be, as he claimed, well prepared for the 2020 Tokyo Olym-
pic Games. Nobody would have imagined that he would be relieved
of his office at this juncture. An unnamed insider told the media that
Liu himself did not know about the transfer until the night of June
19, just as he returned from an international competition.
The CTTA, however, refused to reveal any of the hoped for details,
but claimed that they were “reforming the management personnel”
by replacing individual coaches with coaching teams in which several
coaches jointly manage both the men’s and women’s teams.
“During our investigation into [chief coach of the national wom-
en’s table tennis team] Kong Linghui’s [alleged] involvement in a law-
suit involving gambling debt in Hong Kong, we found deep faults in
the existing management system... We have now decided to cancel
the posts of chief coach and head coach and set up coaching teams
instead, which are respectively in charge of competitions and team
management... The reform aims to reduce the management person-
nel and increase efficiency,” said the CTTA’s statement published on
June 24.Doubts
The national ping pong team was not the only one to be “re-
formed.” For example, Li Yongbo, former head coach of the Chinese
badminton team and former deputy director of the Badminton and
Table Tennis Management Centre (BTTMC), a governmental unit
under the GAS that provides the overall guidance of the management
of badminton and table tennis, was recently dismissed from both
posts and transferred to be a deputy chairman of the China Badmin-
ton Association. Netizens believed it was largely related to the Chi-
nese badminton team’s dissatisfying performance at the Rio Olympic
Games, but Liu’s case was different, they argued.
Given Liu’s achievements, people thought that he would have been
promoted to deputy director of the governmental BTTMC where
Li Yongbo had worked. Liu’s predecessor, Cai Zhenhua, who now
serves as the deputy director for GAS, also worked at the BTTMC
before. However, Liu was only transferred to a deputy chairman of
the non-governmental CTTA and has not yet been given any specific
job. People are concerned that Liu will no longer be involved in the
management of national-level ping pong, let alone lead it.
The transfer issue continued to ferment on June 23, before the
statement, when two coaches and three players – the world-famous
top-seeds Ma Long, Fan Zhendong and Xu Xin – announced they
were abandoning the China Open, in which they were already par-
ticipating. The same day, more players and coaches joined the protest
by tweeting from their individual Weibo accounts that they “miss Liu
Guoliang” and “have no heart for games.” All such comments were
tweeted at the same time and using the same wording.
Such a bold and uniform protest amplified people’s doubts overChinese table tennis team
members pose with their coach
Liu Guoliang after they won
the gold medal at Rio Olympic
Games, August 17, 2016