(Late-night updates: Just finished about 80% of it. I’ll keep editing tomorrow.)
Three years after Wang Chuqin made history by winning all four titles he entered at the Hangzhou Asian Games, he left Aichi-Nagoya with three silvers.
Honestly, the result wasn’t far from what I expected, considering Wang’s physical and mental state coming into the Games. He kept fighting all the way to his last match, and I’m proud of him for that. It may hurt him and his fans for a while, but this is sport. You win, you lose, and eventually you move on.
Still, Nagoya felt very different from Hangzhou.
Compared with the last Asian Games, Wang entered three events instead of four, with no men’s doubles. On paper, the schedule looked lighter. But if the 23-year-old Wang in Hangzhou could somehow keep burning all the way to the last point, the 26-year-old Wang in Nagoya clearly couldn’t do the same anymore.
And those three years in between were not ordinary years.
The Asian Games are more than a sporting event, carrying geoeconomic and geopolitical significance across Asia, particularly for major countries such as China, Japan, India and South Korea. Japan hosted the Games for the first time in 32 years, although domestic enthusiasm remained much more muted than it usually is for the Olympics.
Against that already complicated backdrop, Aichi-Nagoya also drew widespread criticism over its organization. Athletes and delegations complained about accommodation, transportation and other coordination failures, and organizers themselves apologized for some of the logistical problems.1
For Chinese table tennis, another piece of history was on the line. The men’s team was defending eight consecutive Asian Games titles, a winning streak that had lasted since 1994. This young roster was being asked to gain experience while also defending more than three decades of dominance.
And unlike in the past, the Chinese men’s team arrived in Nagoya without the same depth of strength behind that ambition.
Table of contents
Before Nagoya
On June 25, 2026, the CTTA announced its Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games squad. Wang Chuqin, Lin Shidong, and Wen Ruibo qualified through the singles ranking;2 Huang Youzheng through the doubles and mixed-doubles ranking; and Xiang Peng took the final place through internal selection. Liang Jingkun and Zhou Qihao had withdrawn from that selection because of injury and physical-condition concerns.3
Wang and Lin entered men’s singles. Both also carried mixed doubles, Wang with Sun Yingsha and Lin with Kuai Man. The original men’s doubles pairs were Lin/Wen and Huang/Xiang, but shortly before the Games they were rearranged into Lin/Huang and Wen/Xiang.
[2026 China squad + events + September 21 world rankings graphic]
China was still trying to do two things at once: win now while developing the next generation for the LA Olympics.
But the balance had become unusually fragile.
Wang was the only man on the roster with previous Asian Games experience. Lin and Xiang had some championship-level experience, while Wen’s rapid rise that year had come largely through WTT events rather than major championship competition. Four of the five were making their Asian Games debuts.
That naturally brought back comparisons with Jakarta 2018, when China also arrived with an unusually young squad. But the resemblance only goes so far.
In 2018, China still had enormous collective depth. It could leave established core players such as Ma Long and Xu Xin at home and deliberately send younger players to gain major-event experience. Japan made a similar choice, resting several of its leading players.4
[2018 major countries’ squads + world rankings graphic]
Nagoya was different.
Japan arrived with world No. 3 Sora Matsushima, No. 4 Tomokazu Harimoto and No. 13 Shunsuke Togami, the same leading trio that had reached the World Team Championships final only a few months earlier. Behind them were Hiroto Shinozuka at No. 18 and Yukiya Uda at No. 29.
China, meanwhile, no longer had another established championship-level group sitting behind the players it brought.
In 2018, China had depth and chose youth. In 2026, youth was the depth. Time flies. This was the team China had now.
[2026 major teams / China vs. Japan world-ranking graphic]
That made the familiar idea of “win now while developing the future” much harder to balance. And that imbalance would shape almost every important decision later.
Road to the Final
China’s group stage gave little reason for alarm. It swept Macao and Qatar 3-0, rotating through the squad and giving the younger players court time.
The first warning came in the quarterfinal against Thailand. China returned to a more familiar order, with Wang at A, Lin at B and Xiang at C. Wang won the opening match, but Lin, ranked No. 8 in the world, was upset 2-3 by 16-year-old Thitaphat Preechayan, ranked No. 275. Xiang won the third match, then Wang returned to beat Preechayan and close the tie 3-1.5
No crisis. But the pattern was already visible. When one of China’s expected points disappeared, Wang came back and covered it.
The semifinal against Chinese Taipei followed the same basic structure, this time with Wen at C. Wang survived world No. 6 Lin Yun-Ju 3-2, taking the fifth game 15-13. Lin beat Feng Yi-Hsin 3-0, and Wen beat Kuo Guan-Hong 3-1.
China advanced 3-0. Against opponents without Japan’s full strength and depth, the structure worked.
Why the Order Matters
Under the New Swaythling system, the match order is A vs X, B vs Y, C vs Z, A vs Y, B vs X. A and B can each play twice, while C plays only once.6
[A/B/C–X/Y/Z team format graphic from ittf]
But A, B and C are not permanent labels for a team’s No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 players. Coaches assign the letters before each team match and can arrange A and B strategically based on the opponent’s likely order, specific matchups, and head-to-head considerations.
That’s exactly why the order matters.
For this Chinese roster, keeping Wang and Lin in the two double-match positions, whether A/B or B/A, gave China its strongest safety net. Wang was the established No. 1, and Lin was clearly China’s second-strongest singles player. Keeping both in the two-match positions gave China two layers of insurance.
If C lost, Wang and Lin could still finish the tie. If Wang or Lin unexpectedly dropped a point, the other remained available to compensate. Thailand had already shown exactly how that worked. Lin lost his first match, but Wang returned for the fourth and closed the tie.
C, meanwhile, gave the younger player one defined responsibility instead of making him part of the team’s final line of defense.
A basic trust is built into a team event: teammates cover for each other. One mistake doesn’t automatically become fatal, and knowing that gives everyone more confidence.
For this particular lineup, that mattered even more. China no longer had the championship-level collective depth of previous generations, so it had less room to absorb mistakes. The Wang-A/Lin-B structure concentrated the greatest responsibility where China was strongest and limited the risk where it was weakest.
Then, against the strongest opponent China had faced, the team changed it.
The Final Gamble
Japan entered the final with Matsushima at X, Harimoto at Y, and Togami at Z.
China kept Wang at A, but moved Lin from B to C and promoted Wen to B.
[Final lineup / match-order graphic]
The decision had tactical logic behind it. Lin had a favorable matchup against Togami, something the World Team Championships final in London had reinforced earlier that year. Wen had also beaten Harimoto before.
Each choice made tactical sense on its own, but together they shifted the risk dramatically.
Lin, nominally China’s second core player, now had only one match, against Japan’s No. 3 player Togami. He would stay away from both Matsushima and Harimoto, and he would also be removed from the fifth-match position.
Wen would take Harimoto and, if the tie reached 2-2, Matsushima.
Wang would take both Matsushima and Harimoto.
So China’s second-ranked singles player received the most controlled assignment. The least championship-tested player in the lineup received the highest-risk developmental assignment. That left Wang carrying the hardest part of the structure.
There was also a rumor afterward that Wen was told only about four hours before the final that he would play B. I haven’t found reliable confirmation, so I don’t want to treat it as fact. If it was true, though, it would make it even harder for me to understand this as a carefully prepared developmental opportunity.
The original order allowed Wang and Lin to cover for each other. The final order largely depended on Wang winning twice so Wen wouldn’t have to save the tie.
The plan could work, but it left China very little room for anything to go wrong.
Where the Risk Landed
Wang nearly lost the opening point. Matsushima took the first two games 11-5 and 11-8 before Wang dragged himself back with three straight 11-9 games to win 3-2.
Wen then faced Harimoto. He fought harder than I expected and took the second game, but lost 1-3, 6-11, 11-8, 6-11, 9-11.
No real surprise there.
Lin followed against the opponent his position seemed to have been designed for and beat Togami 3-1.
China led 2-1.
Up to that point, the lineup had worked. But this was exactly where the lineup’s risk started to show. China now needed Wang to beat Japan’s other ace, or the deciding fifth match would fall to Wen.
Wang returned against Harimoto.
This time there was no comeback. Harimoto won 3-0, 11-7, 11-4, 11-9, in only 22 minutes.
So the final went exactly where the original Wang-A/Lin-B structure had been designed to keep China stronger: the fifth match.
Except Lin was no longer there.
Wen faced Matsushima for the title. Both were 19, and both were making their Asian Games debuts, so age by itself wasn’t the meaningful difference. What mattered more was where they already stood inside their respective teams. Matsushima entered Nagoya as one of Japan’s established leading singles players and a World Team Championships finalist. Wen had far less major-final experience and was still trying to establish himself at that level.
Wen fought and took a game, but Matsushima won 3-1. Japan won the tie 3-2, taking its first Asian Games men’s team gold since 1966 and ending China’s eight-title winning streak.
And, painfully, nothing about where the risk finally landed was especially surprising.
Wang losing to Harimoto was never unthinkable. The real issue was how heavily China’s plan depended on him avoiding exactly that result.
Nobody needed to prove Wang could beat Matsushima or Harimoto individually. He obviously could, and he had just come back from 0-2 to beat Matsushima. But asking him to beat both of Japan’s aces in the same final was a different level of responsibility, especially under that pressure. At the same time, China’s second-ranked singles player had been assigned only Togami and removed from the deciding position.
Possible is not the same as giving your team a reasonable margin for error.
Once Wang failed to deliver the second point, no experienced second core was there to absorb the loss. The title went directly into Wen’s hands.
Wang later said he had run into mindset issues against Harimoto and hadn’t handled many shots well enough. I don’t need to guess beyond what he said himself. He took responsibility for his performance.
Wen was even harder on himself. He said he had let down the trust and expectations of his coaches and teammates. He said he had failed to bring the team a point and felt “very sorry to the country.”
Wang didn’t publicly question the lineup either. When asked, he said tactical decisions belonged to the coaching staff and the players’ responsibility was to execute them.
But players taking responsibility for their own matches doesn’t erase the coaching staff’s responsibility for how they distributed risk.
Wang Hao defended putting Wen at B by saying the decision had been considered beforehand and that young players needed to experience the pressure and brutality of major finals. China was in a generational transition. Younger players needed opportunities to grow, including room to make mistakes.
I understand that principle.
What I have trouble understanding is how the responsibility was applied in this particular final.
If Wen needed major-final experience, why did that experience have to mean Harimoto first and potentially Matsushima in the deciding match? If Lin was being developed into China’s next core player, why was he moved away from both of Japan’s top two players and from the fifth-match position? And if Wang’s role was to stabilize a young team, why did “stability” effectively mean China’s safest route to gold required him to beat both Japanese aces?
Wang Hao later talked about inheritance, saying Chinese table tennis couldn’t always have the same person facing every difficulty and challenge.
Quite right.
Which makes the lineup rather ironic.
Wang faced Matsushima and Harimoto. Again. The player being developed as the next core took Togami.
For the past two years, “it can’t always be the same person” has somehow kept looking remarkably like the same person.
None of the individual choices were absurd. Lin had a favorable matchup against Togami. Wen had beaten Harimoto before. Wang could beat both Matsushima and Harimoto.
The issue was what all those choices produced together. Lin received the most controlled assignment, Wen received the developmental gamble, and Wang was expected to cover the gap between them.
That isn’t how two established cores share responsibility. Sometimes even a “team” event doesn’t feel all that team-oriented.7
London Had Already Shown Us This
Nagoya followed a pattern the coaches had already used in London.
Only a few months earlier, at the World Team Championships in London, the coaching staff had also managed Lin’s difficult matchups carefully. Before the semifinal against France, Lin expressed concern about facing Felix Lebrun. Wang Hao tried to reduce the pressure by telling him that, as the B player, his main preparation should be for Flavien Coton if the tie reached the fifth match.
Before the final against Japan, Lin himself said Liang Jingkun had more of a psychological advantage against Harimoto. Wang Hao told him to prepare for Togami instead.
So Liang took Harimoto, Wang took Matsushima, and Lin took Togami.
China won 3-0.
The protection worked because China still had Liang.
With another experienced championship-level player available, China had enough collective depth to protect one player from a difficult matchup without making everything else depend on Wang.
Nagoya kept almost the same protection around Lin, but without Liang there to take one of the hardest assignments. That changed everything.
Lin could still take Togami. Fine. But Harimoto still had to be faced. Matsushima still had to be faced. And someone still had to stand there if the tie reached 2-2. Those responsibilities moved.
Wang took both of Japan’s aces. Wen took the decider.
The protection remained. The people paying for it changed.
This is also why I don’t think the Nagoya final should turn into a personal attack on Lin for what happened at the table. He didn’t lose his match. He beat Togami exactly as the team asked him to.
But that doesn’t mean I have to pretend the contradiction isn’t there.
CNT has invested substantial resources, attention, and care in developing Lin as a core player for the next generation. I’ve written enough about that elsewhere, and I don’t need to reopen the whole favoritism and resource-allocation discussion here.
The question in Nagoya is simpler.
When does all that investment start turning into championship responsibility?
You can’t keep developing someone as the next core while steering him around the very matches where a core eventually has to show some guts.
At some point, inheritance has to include the hard part too.
Not Every Young Player Can Be Another Young Wang Chuqin
The fifth match against Japan also brought back another memory for me: the 2022 World Team Championships semifinal.
Fan Zhendong, then China’s established A player, beat Togami but lost to Harimoto. Wang, a World Team Championships newcomer and China’s B player, also lost to Harimoto before returning in the deciding fifth match against Togami.
The tie stood at 2-2.
The young player had to save China.
He did.
Four years later, Wen found himself in almost the same structural position. He had to face Harimoto first, then return if the tie went to a decider.
This time, the 19-year-old couldn’t save it.
And I don’t blame him.
If anything, the comparison shows how dangerous it is to turn Wang’s 2022 performance into a normal expectation for the next young player. What Wang did in Chengdu was exceptional.
Exceptional things shouldn’t quietly become the baseline.
A development system should create conditions in which young players gradually learn to carry championship responsibility. It shouldn’t assume every new player can reproduce an extraordinary rescue just because the previous young player once pulled one off.
And this is where Nagoya becomes more than one questionable lineup decision.
What “Single Core” Actually Means
People often describe the current Chinese men’s team as a single-core team.
That doesn’t mean Wang is the only strong player. It doesn’t mean Lin can’t beat elite opponents either. Lin entered Nagoya ranked No. 8 in the world, had already been world No. 1 the year before, and had beaten plenty of top players.
On paper, Wang and Lin can easily look like another two-core pairing.
But ranking alone isn’t what I mean by “core.”
China’s long years of dominance rested on something deeper: collective depth.
For decades, the team had multiple championship-level players who could carry major responsibility on their own. One could take an elite opponent when the draw demanded it. Another could stand in the deciding match. In singles, more than two players could carry different sections of the draw and preserve the country’s title chances.
If one core lost, the whole structure didn’t immediately become unstable.
Responsibility could move.
During the Paris Olympic cycle, China had Fan Zhendong and Wang Chuqin. During the Tokyo cycle, it had Ma Long and Fan Zhendong. Before that, it had Ma Long and Zhang Jike. Often, China’s depth went beyond even those two names.
That collective depth was one foundation of China’s long domination. It wasn’t one extraordinary player rescuing every weak point. It was a group of championship-level players who could take responsibility for one another.
Nagoya showed how much of that collective depth is now gone.
Japan, ironically, looked closer to that structure in the final.
When Matsushima lost the opening match, Japan didn’t collapse. Harimoto could still take a point. Then another. When the tie reached 2-2, Matsushima returned and closed it out.
Responsibility moved between Japan’s two leading players.
China’s responsibility didn’t move the same way. When the hardest assignments had to be distributed, Lin moved to C, away from Matsushima, Harimoto, and the decider. Wang took both Japanese aces. Wen took the fifth-match risk.
For all the resources invested in developing a second core, the second core got the most controlled assignment when the final actually arrived.
And that irony became even harder to ignore a few days later.
Lin faced Matsushima in the men’s singles quarterfinal and beat him. He then survived Lin Yun-Ju in the semifinal before beating Wang 4-0 in the final.
No, that doesn’t prove Lin would have beaten Matsushima in the team final. Different day, different format, different pressure. A later singles result can’t simply be transported backward and used to rewrite what would have happened.
But it does make the earlier protection more striking.
The player China had moved away from Matsushima proved, later in the same tournament, that he was perfectly capable of challenging him.
And we already knew that possibility existed. In the closed training camp a month earlier, Lin had specifically prepared for Matsushima because Matsushima was expected to be in his half of the singles draw, with Harimoto another possible obstacle on the title path.
So yes, at some point I want to see some guts.
If Lin is being developed as China’s next core, or even the top 1, challenge the strongest opponents. Take the responsibility. Try first.
Don’t surrender the hard assignment for him before he’s even stepped onto the court. Lin Shidong and Wang Hao, this is where I want to see some guts. This isn’t the fearless, hard-edged Team China we saw in the past.
At some point, protecting a future core starts getting in the way of actually building one.
The Cost of Being the Safety Net
By the singles final, though, another difference couldn’t be ignored.
Wang had already gone through the five-game comeback against Matsushima, the loss to Harimoto, the loss of the team title and everything surrounding it, while also competing across multiple events. After beating Wang 4-0 in the singles final, Lin himself pointed to Wang’s fatigue and physical condition.
Nagoya also showed that Wang’s role as the team’s safety net extended far beyond the men’s team event.
Nagoya wasn’t the only place where China used Wang as its safety net.
In mixed doubles, Lin Shidong and Kuai Man were the newer pairing being developed toward the next Olympic cycle. But China still entered Wang Chuqin and Sun Yingsha, its proven championship pair, alongside them.
Again, the system wanted two things at once: develop the future without giving up security in the present.
And again, Wang was part of the security.
That is why I have trouble with the idea that receiving the most important assignments automatically means a player is being favored. Sometimes a player receives more because the system trusts him more. Sometimes he receives more because other parts of the structure still aren’t secure enough to stand without him.
The team event made that pattern unusually visible. Lin could receive the matchup the coaches trusted most because Wang was expected to handle Japan’s two strongest players. Wen could get a major-final opportunity because Wang was expected to keep China close enough for it to matter. A newer mixed-doubles pair could be developed while Wang/Sun remained the proven championship insurance behind it.
The same player kept appearing wherever China needed certainty.
A player can be indispensable without being protected.
For years, the logic the coaches used on Wang seemed simple: You’re capable, so you carry more.
At first, that can sound like trust. Even privilege. But when the same logic keeps being applied year after year, across team events, singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, you start to see the other side of it. A system can rely on someone so heavily that what looks like preference from the outside starts to feel, from another angle, like repeated use.
So the question for me is no longer simply how much Wang can carry. It’s what carrying it all has already cost him.
We’ve talked about the mixed-doubles problem many times, so I’ll save the larger discussion for another post.
But Wang’s workload matters here.
Nagoya once again showed what competing across multiple events eventually demands from a player. Switching constantly between team matches, singles, and mixed doubles requires repeated physical and tactical adjustment during competition, with an even heavier training load beforehand.
Wang has carried one of the toughest workloads in world table tennis for years.
The three years since Hangzhou were not three ordinary years. You can’t expect today’s Wang to have the same physical freshness, energy and fire as his 23-year-old self while also carrying three more years of competition, expectation, responsibility and pressure.
For too long, it has felt to me as if CNT kept overdrafting him, borrowing from his future to solve the present.
And that’s why I don’t think his situation can be compared so casually with other players, even his Chinese teammates.
Add the pressure of anchoring a team that no longer has the collective depth China once took for granted, and Nagoya starts to look less like something that suddenly went wrong and more like a risk the system had been leaving itself open to for years.
Maybe it showed up here. Maybe it started much earlier.
Japan earned that team gold. Nothing about China’s mistakes should take that away from them. But from the Chinese side, the loss didn’t belong only to the players standing at the table.
The system failed them too.
And Then He Had to Carry the Loss Too
Almost immediately after the team final, the posts and comments from friends on mainland Chinese social media seemed to pour the blame onto Wang.
As though he were the guilty one. The only one.
As though he had been the only person who played the final, the only person who chose the lineup, the only person responsible for losing a gold medal tied to so much national pride and an eight-title winning streak.
Unfortunately, that part also felt predictable.
Few Chinese table tennis players live under the level of scrutiny Wang does. People love him, hate him, watch him, talk about him, and dissect him. Every result becomes larger around him.
And to me, CNT has too often failed to protect him from that machinery.
Yet when the team needs someone to carry the competitive pressure, the public pressure and the consequences of a collective decision, he somehow ends up right in the middle of it.
He is expected to carry.
Then, when the structure breaks, he is expected to carry that too.
Once Wang and Lin both reached the singles final, though, some of the pressure to win clearly eased. China had secured the gold and silver. His responsibility to the team and to national pride had already been carried to the end.
But when only his own singles goal remained, somehow he couldn’t carry himself through that last bit anymore.
I also think the team-final loss hit him more deeply than we first realized.
I don’t know exactly what happened inside CNT, but Nagoya made me look at his position there differently again.
Part of me wonders what it feels like to realize that the people around you can rely on you completely without necessarily protecting you in the same way.
They can rely on you without always betting on you.
It sounds contradictory.
But familiar?
Look back at the story behind Hangzhou.
And sure, maybe on paper there is “nothing wrong” with any of it. Team strategy. The bigger picture. National responsibility. Development. Inheritance. All the righteous reasons.
Almost everything can be justified somehow.
But strip those explanations away, and I still see the same systemic bias underneath, something I’ve written about enough elsewhere and don’t need to reopen completely here.
Lin played very well in Nagoya. Four events, young, physically strong, and he earned his titles. I genuinely can’t wait to see him keep shining, especially in mixed doubles. Lin/Kuai really impressed me. Time to start taking some weight off the captain’s shoulders, just like Wang did three years ago.
After all, we remember the logic the coaches used on Wang for years: You’re capable, so you carry more.
Show some guts. Keep fighting, Lin.
As for our captain, enough carrying for now. Get some rest. Relax. Stay away from mixed doubles for a while. Rebuild your trust in the team and in the people around you.
Not your trust in yourself.
See you next time, baby lion. It doesn’t have to be soon. 👐
Read More
日本男子、中国を3―2で破り60年ぶり金 アジア大会卓球、32年続いた中国の連覇を止める | Japan.co.jp
References
- Japanese Public Overwhelmingly Rejects 2026 Asian Games Amid Chaos – The Chosun Daily ↩︎
- World Ranking, Men’s Singles, 2026 Week #39, September 21 – ITTF ↩︎
- 中国队爱知-名古屋亚运会参赛名单出炉 – 乒乓世界TTW ↩︎
- Asian Games table tennis team grouping unveiled – Xinhua ↩︎
- Feature: Thai teenager Preechayan makes waves on table tennis at Asian Games-Xinhua ↩︎
- ITTF Statutes 2026: 3.7.6 Team Match Systems ↩︎
- Quote from a friend, Arisa ↩︎
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