Category: Interviews & Profiles

These three People’s Daily articles, spanning fourteen years from 1981 to 1995, trace the arc of Li Ning’s transformation from teenage gymnastics prodigy to business entrepreneur. Read together, they chart not only an individual career but a broader shift in Chinese sport and society, as the values and constraints of Mao-era athletic culture gradually gave way to new possibilities.

The first piece, published on August 30, 1981, introduces Li Ning at eighteen as a rising talent who had just won China’s first gold medal at the World University Games in Bucharest. Its narrative structure would become familiar in Chinese sports journalism: early discovery, setbacks overcome through ideological commitment, and moral guidance from exemplary teammates—in this case, Tong Fei. Li Ning appears here as a product of the state sports system at its ideological peak, his achievements framed primarily in terms of collective honor, discipline, and service to the nation rather than personal advancement.

By the end of the 1980s, both Li Ning’s career and China itself were entering a period of profound transition. Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Deng Xiaoping initiated a series of economic reforms that gradually loosened the rigid command economy of the Mao years. Limited private enterprise and selective engagement with foreign capital were introduced, even as Communist Party control remained firmly in place. In the early 1980s, these reforms were tentative and uneven; by the early 1990s, they had begun to reshape everyday life, labor, and ambition, including elite sport.

It is against this backdrop that the second article, published in October 1990, finds Li Ning navigating unfamiliar terrain. Retired from gymnastics, he had joined Jianlibao, a state-owned sports drink manufacturer, to help develop China’s first indigenous sportswear brand. The piece reveals an athlete unsettled by the indignity of competing in foreign-branded clothing and determined to create a Chinese alternative. In a familiar literary trope about emerging markets, we witness Li Ning trying to cut across time and space in impossible ways. The writer even suggests that, for the retired gymnast, time itself has become three-dimensional.

The final piece, from March 1995, is an obituary for Li Ning’s mother. Qin Zhenmei, who died of cancer at fifty-four, is presented as the archetype of the self-sacrificing Chinese mother—a mother who went to great lengths to sew her son a training uniform and who promoted her son’s clothing brand from her deathbed. Yet the article is equally structured around Li Ning’s confession of filial failure—his admission that years of relentless work left him scarcely present at her bedside, sharing only three meals with her in her final year. Here, personal loss and moral regret serve to place commercial success within an acceptable moral framework, ensuring that entrepreneurial achievement does not appear to override traditional obligations.

Enjoy this longitudinal view of Li Ning’s biography, as refracted through the People’s Daily.

The following profile of Chinese gymnast Li Yuejiu, published in the People’s Daily on March 29, 1982, exemplifies the distinctive style of state-sponsored sports journalism in early reform-era China. Written by Lu Guang for the Communist Party’s official newspaper, the piece transforms Li’s 1981 gymnastics career into an extended parable about patriotic sacrifice, revolutionary determination, and the superiority of socialist training methods.

The article’s rhetorical construction reveals much about how Chinese state media framed elite sport during this period. Li’s physical “shortcomings” become opportunities to demonstrate that socialist willpower can overcome natural limitations. His Hartford injury transforms into a morality play about bleeding for the motherland. The defeat of Japan carries obvious nationalist symbolism, framed through the “watermelon banquet” vow. Most explicitly, the profile’s final section—”The Flag in His Heart”—abandons any pretense of sports journalism for pure propagandistic celebration, with the five-star red flag appearing obsessively throughout Li’s training diary and “filling the space of the gymnasium” in his vision.

Despite its heavy ideological overtones, the profile does document genuine athletic innovation. Li Yuejiu was indeed a groundbreaking tumbler who became China’s first world champion in men’s gymnastics. (Li Xiaoping also won gold on pommel horse in 1981.) The challenge for contemporary readers is separating the factual athletic narrative from its ideological packaging. It requires recognizing both Li’s legitimate achievements and the ways those achievements were instrumentalized by state media to serve broader political purposes during a pivotal moment in Chinese sports history.

Enjoy this piece about the gymnast whom the Hartford Courant described as a “tiny fireplug” who “exudes charisma and elan.”