October 11, 2026

Suffering as Investment

As I looked more closely at Chinese table tennis, one thing kept bothering me. Chinese athletes often seemed extraordinarily hard on themselves. Heavy training, exhaustion, playing through pain, giving up large parts of ordinary life, and sometimes talking about those experiences with remarkably little complaint.

Elite sport everywhere demands sacrifice and rewards toughness. But in China, pushing through hardship often seemed to carry an extra layer of meaning, almost as if the ability to endure were part of proving that you deserved whatever came next.

Wang Chuqin is an obvious example. For years, he has carried an unusually heavy training and competition load across singles and doubles, often with little room for recovery and little public complaint. At some point, outside expectations can work their way inward. Eventually, nobody has to stand behind you every day saying, “Push harder.” You may already be saying it to yourself.

Something Coach Xiao Zhan said before the Paris Olympics brought that tension into sharper focus.

During an intensified training block, Wang talked about the unusual pain he was suffering. The CNT’s strength and conditioning coach described it as a normal physical reaction to the training load. Xiao then treated the hardship as part of the process, even something positive: “Hardships come first, and that’s a good thing.”

That line stayed with me. Look at the positive meaning attached to hardship. Pain could still belong to progress. Enduring it could become part of the road forward.

That brought me back to my years studying East Asian history. In college, I took several courses on traditional East Asia, and in a class called Modern China, I wrote a paper on Qing dynasty migration policy. My professor, Madeleine Zelin, suggested that I think about the philosophy underneath those policies, especially the idea that hardship could function as a kind of investment.

I started calling that logic “suffering as investment.”

By that phrase, I mean three related things.

Hardship in the present can be understood as a cost paid toward something valuable in the future.
Enduring that hardship can also take on moral value, becoming evidence of discipline, commitment, responsibility, or worth.
Once an institution repeatedly rewards that endurance, people can begin to internalize the expectation and demand the same thing from themselves.

The Qing’s resettlement from the mid-17th century onward, often known as “Huguang Fills Sichuan,” helped clarify the first part. After prolonged warfare, population loss, and epidemic disease devastated parts of Sichuan, Qing authorities encouraged migrants to return or resettle there, reclaim abandoned land, and rebuild agricultural communities through tax relief and other favorable reclamation policies.¹ People took on difficult, uncertain lives in the present with the possibility of land, livelihood, stability, and a future for their families on the other side.

The logic felt familiar.

You don’t have to study Chinese history for long before Confucius and Mencius start showing up everywhere, and their influence reaches far beyond philosophy books. For more than two thousand years, Confucian thought shaped Chinese education, government, family ethics, and ideas about proper conduct. Confucius linked moral development to learning to regulate desire and act properly within relationships, while Mencius left one of the most enduring images: adversity as preparation for greater responsibility.² Together, those traditions helped shape a moral vocabulary in which self-discipline, fulfilling one’s role, and continuing to fulfill responsibility through difficulty could hold real ethical weight.

The imperial examination system in imperial China gave that cultural logic a much more concrete social form. For centuries, success in the examinations could open a path into official life, status, and social mobility, giving men without wealth or inherited rank one of the few recognized opportunities to enter the governing elite and change the prospects of an entire household.³ The old expression “ten years at the cold window” captures the ideal behind that path. It evokes years of obscurity and disciplined study in poor, austere conditions before even having a chance at recognition. Stories of scholars tying their hair to a beam or pricking themselves to stay awake pushed that admiration for endurance to extremes.

The stories taught generations of Chinese readers what kind of person deserved admiration: the one who kept going, resisted comfort, and was willing to sacrifice more in the present because the future goal mattered more.

Effort never guaranteed success, but serious achievement should first come with a price.

Journey to the West may be the clearest popular-cultural example. One of China’s Four Great Classical Novels, it was published in the 16th century and has shaped Chinese storytelling and popular culture for centuries. Near the end, Guanyin, the bodhisattva overseeing the pilgrimage, reviews the Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang’s journey and discovers that he and his companions have passed through only eighty ordeals. One final trial has to be added before the pilgrimage can truly be complete. The Eighty-One Tribulations eventually became one of the story’s most recognizable motifs.

The travelers have essentially reached the end, yet the journey still lacks something until the full measure of hardship has been endured. The story reflects a cultural logic its audience already understood and, through centuries of retelling, helped carry that logic forward: a great journey should test you, and someone worthy of the destination should have endured something along the way.

Religion complicates the picture too. Christianity has long given suffering meanings tied to sacrifice and redemption, while Buddhism places suffering at the center of human life but also rejects extremes through the Middle Way.⁴ That history deserves its own discussion, so I’ll leave it there.

That takes us beyond “no pain, no gain.”

Americans grew up with our own version of this: “no pain, no gain.” The phrase has long been part of the language around sports, exercise, work, and achievement. Worthwhile things take effort, and discomfort doesn’t automatically mean you should quit.

But contemporary American sports also talks much more openly about recovery, mental health, smarter training, boundaries, and the athlete’s right to recognize when continuing has become unsafe.

The more interesting question begins when hardship reaches a limit. When does pain still mean training, and when does it mean damage? Who decides, and what makes stopping feel acceptable or unacceptable?

One of the clearest ways to see how that conversation has changed in the United States is through two Olympic gymnasts, twenty-five years apart.

At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, American gymnast Kerri Strug injured her ankle on her first vault during the women’s team final. She told coach Bela Karolyi that something was seriously wrong. At the time, the U.S. team believed another strong vault might still be needed to secure the gold, so Strug went again. She landed the second vault on one good leg, saluted the judges, and collapsed in pain.⁵ She later explained that she felt she had to do it because she didn’t want all of the team’s work to disappear in a few seconds.⁶ Contemporary coverage immediately framed the moment as a story of courage, sacrifice, toughness, and putting the team first.

America loved that story.

Strug became a national hero, and the image of coach Karolyi carrying her to the medal podium became one of the defining images of the Games. The injury cost her the all-around and later event finals, and Atlanta ultimately became the last major competition of her elite career. Questions arose almost immediately about whether the second vault had really been necessary and whether the cost had been too high. But the dominant cultural memory centered on what she had been willing to endure for the team.

Twenty-five years later, Simone Biles reached a very different kind of limit in the same sport.

At the Tokyo Olympics, Biles developed what gymnasts call the “twisties,” a loss of reliable spatial awareness in the air that can make high-difficulty skills dangerous. After struggling on vault in the team final, she withdrew from the rest of the day’s competition and later pulled out of several individual finals. USA Gymnastics publicly supported her, and Biles continued medical evaluations and worked with a sports psychologist before returning for the balance beam final.

Simone Biles performs on the vault at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. AP Photo/Ashley Landis

Biles absolutely faced criticism. The older American idea of toughness hadn’t disappeared. But her decision landed in a very different gymnastics environment from the one Strug competed in.

In the years before Tokyo, the Larry Nassar abuse scandal had forced USA Gymnastics into a much broader reckoning over athlete safety, institutional power, and whether athletes had enough say over what happened to their own bodies. The organization later adopted reforms including an Athlete Bill of Rights, greater athlete representation, and explicit support for athletes speaking up about decisions affecting their health and welfare. USA Gymnastics has acknowledged that athletes in earlier years often hesitated to speak up.⁷

The athlete didn’t suddenly become less tough. The definition of toughness had started to make room for another answer.

In Strug’s moment, courage meant continuing through injury because the team needed her. By Biles’s moment, a substantial part of American sports culture could also understand courage as knowing your limits and taking responsibility for your own well-being.

The older instinct never disappeared. Athletes still play hurt, and fans still admire sacrifice. But recovery, mental health, athlete welfare, and the athlete’s authority over where the limit lies have gained much more legitimacy.

The Strug-Biles contrast sharpened the difference I was trying to understand.

The more revealing difference may lie in how many reasons Chinese athletes are given to keep carrying the pain.

Part of that comes from the broader culture. Chinese has an everyday expression “to eat bitterness,” meaning to endure hardship. This admiration for endurance extends far beyond sports, into education, work, family expectations, and everyday ideas about serious effort.

Elite sport takes that wider ethic and concentrates it.

Then the institution adds its own weight.

Research on China’s Whole-Nation System describes a centralized, medal-oriented, semi-closed environment and identifies autonomy, performance pressure, and career transition as recurring issues for elite athletes. Specialized sports schools and a multi-level development system also mean some athletes enter highly structured training environments when they are still very young.⁸

For those athletes, sport can shape far more than training hours. It can organize where they grow up, how their days run, who teaches them, what opportunities they receive, and what future they imagine for themselves.

While we constantly talk about work-life balance, some Chinese elite athletes grow up in an environment where work and life barely separate.

Then success adds more weight.

An athlete may push through hardship for personal ambition, but also for responsibilities that reach far beyond the self. Endurance can come to stand for gratitude, loyalty, duty, and proof that he or she can be trusted with more.

Greater success can bring more responsibility rather than more freedom.

Your own dream.

The coach who invested years in you.

The team that depends on you.

The institution that developed you.

Eventually, the expectations that come with representing China.

Carry, carry, carry.

Two of China’s biggest sports stars from the 2000s and 2010s offer very different ways of seeing what happens when that burden collides with the body.

Liu Xiang, the 110-meter hurdles champion at the 2004 Athens Olympics, entered the 2008 Beijing Games under enormous pressure to defend his title at home. By then, he was also one of the faces of the Games, a major commercial star, and a symbol of national sporting pride. Contemporary reports even valued a Beijing gold for Liu at around 1 billion yuan,⁹ roughly US$146 million at the time. An Achilles problem had worsened during preparation, but he still walked into the stadium for his opening heat before withdrawing at the start.¹⁰ Years later, Liu admitted that he had underestimated the injury and kept increasing his training load while chasing results. The criticism afterward cut deeply enough that he later emphasized how much he hated being called a coward or accused of running away from competition. He also said he felt he had failed the whole country’s expectations.¹¹

When an athlete reaches that point, “choice” can become a much more complicated word.

Li Na, the two-time Grand Slam tennis champion, offers another answer to the same problem. (I still remember watching her 2013 US Open quarterfinal in person!) She also came through China’s state sports system before building a much more independent professional career. Before the 2002 Asian Games, prolonged pressure and physical problems had left her in poor condition. After seeing an outside doctor, she called her mother, who told her, “That’s enough. You only get one body.” Li later remembered feeling as if an enormous weight had lifted.¹² Years later, her career became known not only for what she won but for how hard she fought for greater control over her training, schedule, coaching, and professional life. She continued to credit the Chinese system with giving her the foundation for her success,¹³ while also insisting on more authority over her own body and professional life.

Liu Xiang quits the men’s 110m hurdles after an Achilles injury at the Beijing Olympic Games.

A Chinese elite athlete may carry personal ambition, loyalty to a coach, gratitude for years of institutional investment, responsibility to teammates, public expectation, and eventually national duty. Add a cultural respect for endurance, and stopping can become much more than a medical decision.

It can feel like a failure of character.

All of those pressures can meet inside one body.

Seen in that larger context, Xiao Zhan’s words sound different.

“Hardships come first, and that’s a good thing.”

I don’t hear that as some uniquely Chinese command to suffer. But look at how easily the sentence fits into the larger structure around it. Pushing through can mean discipline, seriousness, gratitude, and responsibility.

At the same time, another language has become much more visible in sports: finding joy in the game, knowing your limits, training effectively rather than simply training more, and giving athletes more control over their own development. Li Na has said she didn’t truly start enjoying tennis until later in her career. She has since advocated for young athletes to find “happiness, confidence and control.”

That contrast makes me wonder whether parts of Chinese table tennis still lean too heavily on an older idea of toughness: push harder, carry more, endure longer, and treat the ability to keep going as proof that the process is working.

That’s what I mean by “suffering as investment.” The idea doesn’t promise that suffering will lead to success. It gives suffering a direction, toward some future value. Once that logic moves inside the athlete, the line between “I have to” and “I want to” can become hard to see.

The difference may not be how much athletes suffer, but how many reasons they are given to believe they should keep suffering.

And when the investment starts consuming the future it was supposed to build, who gets to decide that enough is enough?

Structural Fatigue. Unsustainable.

“Giving my all to be my best self.” Interview 02/2025

The Weight of Three Fronts of Wang Chuqin vs. Systemic Bias Against Left-Handers in Chinese Table Tennis

References