World Team Table Tennis Championships: China win both titles again. Why are they so successful?

China's men and women both won gold at the 2026 World Team Table Tennis Championships Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images Share articleChina are known for their prowess across a wide range of sports. The 2024 Olympic Games’ final medal table highlighted their success as they won a joint-high 40 golds, level with the United States. Last week, Wu Yize received a hero’s welcome on his return to China as the second-youngest world snooker champion ever. But China’s first world champion, in 1959, was a table tennis player — Rong Guotuan. His triumph not only turned him into a celebrity but led to a surge in popularity for the sport, also known as ping pong, in his homeland and, eventually, helped transform how China was perceived globally. Ever since Rong’s victory, China’s national team has been one of the most decorated in the world. In London over the weekend, their players again asserted dominance by winning both the men’s and women’s titles at the World Team Table Tennis Championships. “Beating China in a table tennis team event is one of the hardest asks in sport,” Tom Jarvis, England’s top men’s player, told The Athletic. But how did China become so much more successful at this sport than any other country, and maintain that position over several decades? From repetition until perfection, to the ‘king of comebacks,’ this is how they did it. Queues snaked around London’s Wembley Arena on Sunday, waiting for a rare opportunity to see the Chinese team in action in the United Kingdom. Once inside, the crowds watched on, spellbound in the darkness; spotlights radiating over the table tennis players as if they were performers on a stage. Chinese fans, waving flags and wearing face paint, made up the majority of the 7,000 crowd in the sold-out venue. Fans shouted “Jiayou,” roughly translating to ‘add oil’ or ‘let’s go’, to offer the players encouragement in the men’s and women’s finals, both against Japan. In recent history, China have proven unstoppable in this competition, which is held every two years. Their men have won the past 12 editions and the women seven in a row. The men didn’t drop a game to Japan in the final, winning 3-0, while the women — a squad that includes six out of the world’s top 10 players, including top-ranked Sun Yingsha, who won all nine of her games in London — lost only three games in their seven matches, winning 3-0 in five of them. Victory in both Sunday’s finals, which concluded the tournament’s centenary edition, secured China’s 24th titles in both the men’s and women’s events. Only one other nation has won more than 10 team championships: Hungary’s men’s, with 12. Add the 37 out of a possible 42 Olympic table tennis gold medals that Chinese athletes have won and you have quite an impressive collection. Their success has even led to rule changes. After China swept the Olympic golds, silvers and bronzes in the men’s and women’s singles at the 2008 Games on home soil in Beijing, nations were only allowed to enter two players per competition. “In terms of skill, the opponent was better,” Tomokazu Harimoto, of the Japanese men’s team, said in the post-match press conference. “Although Team China had tough times, they managed to win this whole thing, so their mentality is really strong. We need to practice a lot and the (mental) power to get the one last point for the win is one of the most important things.” China did show some vulnerability in London. For the first time in 26 years, their men’s team were beaten, defeated in the seeding stage by both South Korea and Sweden. They were on the ropes… until they weren’t, overcoming immense pressure to restore natural order come the finals. China’s men were led by world number one Wang Chuqin, 26. Even without Fan Zhendong, the reigning Olympic champion and 2025 Chinese National Games winner, who pulled out last month for unspecified personal reasons, there was no real sense they would relinquish their crown. Liang Jingkun exemplified the team’s resilience. Written off by some as past his prime, the 29-year-old twice recovered from 2-0 deficits, against France’s Felix Lebrun in the semifinals and Harimoto in the first game of the finals, to earn the nickname the ‘King of the Comeback’. “For our whole team, this championship has been a rollercoaster ride,” Wang, who went undefeated in 10 matches, said after the final. “We’re all under the spotlight, whether it’s from other teams or other players or the public, we’ve received a lot of noise and pressure about this victory.” Back home, where table tennis is considered the national sport, armchair viewers would have expected nothing less than victory. China’s passion for the sport is evident from World Table Tennis’ (WTT) 5.4 million followers on Chinese social media platform Weibo. The organisation has just 112,000 on X. Tin-Tin Ho, who is of Hong Kong heritage, is the English number one in women’s singles. She spent most of her childhood summers at table tennis camps in China, after being sent there by her parents. “Any city you go, they’ve got a good table tennis facility,” Ho said. “It’s a lot of discipline and repetition until perfection.” World-renowned facilities include the Zhengding training base, located two hours south of Beijing, where the national teams do intensive, closed-door training. Wang said the team was together for 40 days before the tournament in London began. With a population of 1.4 billion, and an estimated 300m table tennis players, according to UK newspaper The Guardian, China encourages children to play the sport from school age. Those considered to have potential are funnelled into a structured pipeline leading from provincial academies, where they play for hours a day under specialised coaches, to the national team. This system creates great depth and a level of competition for places that few other countries can match, even if it can be at the expense of what most people would deem a routine childhood. “From an early age, they go to table tennis schools, and they’ll be training three to four times a day, and it’ll be their life. There’s so much internal competition that it’ll make them all better in the end, and when they come out into the rest of the world, they’ve probably competed against better players for their whole life already,” Jarvis, who led England’s men to the tournament’s round of 16, said. “I started when I was six, and I think table tennis is such a complicated sport and there’s so much to learn that starting at a young age is really important. The biggest thing (to learn) is the spin (which players put on the ball), which people don’t see on screen.” “To develop players, you need to focus on getting the right technique from a very young age and train a large amount. The coach must have an excellent training scheme,” said Weixin Hu, a former national-team coach and player for China. Hu was part of the Chinese delegation that visited the United States in 1972, meeting President Richard Nixon in the White House’s Rose Garden. A year earlier, the U.S. table tennis team became the first American representatives to visit China since the Communist revolution in 1949, in what became known as ping-pong diplomacy, a process which opened up China to the West and helped ease tensions between the two countries, with the U.S. dropping sanctions against the Chinese after the visit. While the success of China’s women has been constant since the 1980s, the domination of its men faltered slightly as they lost two Team World Championships finals to Sweden, in 1989 and 1993. It’s widely reported that this forced China to innovate from blanket-taught techniques, such as the pen-holder grip, which involves holding the racket using the thumb and index finger, to different grips and styles of play. “Innovation began before the loss, but it takes many years,” Hu said. “The new generation of players, like Ma Wenge, played more like their European counterparts, but were still young and not part of the World Championship team.” Hu helped develop future Chinese national champion Wenge, and later identified Sweden’s 2024 Olympic silver medalist Truls Moregardh and worked with then European title holder Michael Maze while coaching Denmark’s national team. “Identifying real talent is a top skill. It’s not just about looking at the ranking. In reality, you need to see the player play the game,” Hu said. “During training, one can tell, but sometimes when a young player trains and plays matches, it’s different. The top talents know how to solve problems in matches. “The mental strength part is also important to develop. Players need a tactical mind and a splendid overall strategy.” In London, there were 64 competing nations in both the men’s and women’s competitions. The oldest player was 73-year-old Wang Qi, who was born in China but granted special citizenship to represent Fiji before the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Switzerland’s Enya Hu, the youngest participant at 12, was also of Chinese descent. Is one country’s total domination good for the sport? “China’s sustained excellence sets a standard that challenges every other member association to raise their game, and we are seeing that happen,” International Table Tennis Federation president Petra Sorling told the China-based Global Times news outlet last month. With China transitioning between generations, rivals sensed an opportunity to interrupt their supremacy at these championships, particularly with young Japanese stars emerging, such as 17-year-old Miwa Harimoto, the best under-19 women’s player in the world, who won the opening match in this year’s final against China. Sweden have the men’s world number two in Moregardh and were the last men’s team other than China to win the world title, doing so in 2000, but they lost to Chinese Taipei in the semi-finals this year. It was China who left London with both trophies. The rest of the table tennis world is still playing catch-up. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms