In a sentence

He turned “power” into a precise technique, and three World Championships men’s singles trophies showed the scale of what hard work could do.

Playing style

  • A forehand loop with both power and spin, able to attack hard even from mid- and long distance
  • Outstanding physicality and wide coverage, very hard to move around in a rally
  • His backhand grew from a weakness into a strength; by his later career he had no clear shortfall

Career and key moments

In Osaka in 2001, Shanghai in 2005 and Zagreb in 2007 he won the World Championships men’s singles three times, one of the strongest records in the event for a Chinese player after Zhuang Zedong. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics he won men’s doubles gold with Yan Sen, and in 2008 in Beijing he helped the team to the men’s team title. He later moved into administration and is now president of the Chinese Table Tennis Association.

What he left the game

He is a case study in “late bloomer plus the long game”: technique can be filled in piece by piece, as long as the body and the will hold up. In 2025, as CTTA president, he publicly took a competition dispute to the ITTF — his role had shifted from player to gatekeeper.

In a sentence: The people who patch their weaknesses one by one often end up going the farthest.