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Yes. NBA is not big in Netherlands! Since Yao Ming, it is huge in China. I saw games on TVs everywhere in China last winter. (My hometown team, the Houston Rockets, are especially popular there, since that was Yao Ming's team, and the uniforms with red white and yellow look a bit like the...

All that aside, though, I am a Ma Long fan (FZD too). More than ever. I hope they play again soon.

By the way, lists of popularity of athletes all suffer from flawed methodology that make them pretty uncertain, including the ones Forbes and ESPN use. Academic researchers who study this kind of thing just laugh at what they do. People in the US will often see "ratings" of all sorts of things...

Here. She was on Dancing With the Stars this year, LOL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Biles

For sure corruption has been rampant in China. Chinese leaders at many levels have tried to deal with it (it is a genuine problem), but have also weaponized anti-corruption enforcement to eliminate rivals.

Olympic gold medal gymnast (dominant performance, many golds including all around) in 2016. Possibly the most popular woman athlete in the US

No doubt about that. It had to be a loss of face for him. All the more reason for him to be a bit defensive when he took the job, and that could add to problems he has with CZH.

The GSA budget may be low, but the activities they control represent huge money. Plenty of money to be made and spread around, and the government wants to control it. The budget allocated does not tell the story, assuming those figures are accurate. Transparency is not something most people...

Since we are all speculating here, I will add one based on no solid knowledge except my experience with administrative structures in my professional life (and a bit of knowledge of human nature I got from that), and a bit of knowledge about how people get promoted in the CCP. What I am writing...

Here is some stuff that interested me. The GSA has several departments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_General_Administration_of_Sports . One of them is the Party Committee, which they have always had. That is the department that is almost certainly deciding what to do about this whole...

It might be "punishing yourself" if you were the CTTA and interested in sports. If you are someone/something else much more concerned with internal Chinese affairs and maintaining Party discipline and a certain throwback ideology, and if you don't care about sports except as a way to project an...

I didn't at all mean to suggest it had anything to do with the boycott (that idea never crossed my mind). That timing pretty much has to be coincidental. I did mean to suggest things that shine a light on the guy making decisions right now -- his background, tendencies, the kind of rhetoric he...

ABS is actually closer to celluloid than previous cellulose acetate. Hard to imagine a more effective style than Ma Long and FZD. You need a good BH off the bounce now. The trend toward stronger players started with WLQ. It is even more important now. You can see for example FZD is in...

This is the guy who probably decides what happens with these players. The fact that he has decided to found a communist party school within GSA does not surprise me after reading more about him. http://english.pku.edu.cn/news_events/news/focus/3999.htm Before getting too excited about what a...

As for Chinese people at TTD and elsewhere relaying to us what appears on Chinese websites and media, that is actually a service to non-Chinese speaking people! How else are most of us going to find out? A lot of us are sophisticated enough to know that average person on the street does...

True there is absolutely no reason to think that a Vietnamese guy living in France would have any secret insight on the machinations of Chinese sports politics, so I never even bothered to click once I saw who it was. I know too that some stuff about this whole affair we will not find out soon...

Actually, in a table tennis forum that is based and operated in countries where the internet is free and open, there is a lot more that is of interest in this affair than whether or not "the players are fine". Questions like, how did this happen? Who ultimately made the decision? What does...

And of course forumers someimes claim to have super EJ powers. Once I saw a forumer argue that Jin Mitzutani had switched from a ZLC to a sZLC because he could see the different trajectory of the ball coming off his blade on youtube videos.

War over what? Why would Gou want CZH out?

I know you didn't mean it was the same as NK. I just wanted to make the point in case someone else thought that. I agree, the Dear Leader stuff is a scary. There was a bit of that going on in a recent Trump cabinet meeting. It was ridiculed severely. I am still amazed that XJP tolerates a...