The Boxing Rebellion - The New Yorker
Zou Shiming, the captain of China’s boxing team. Chinese boxing officials have a name for their objective in this summer’s Olympics, to be held in Beijing: the “zero-gold-medal breakthrough.” Photograph by Ian Teh.
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On a cold night in November, Zou Shiming, the captain of China’s national boxing team, arrived early for a banquet in his honor at a Chinese restaurant in a mall in Chicago, where the amateur world championships were being held. Zou is twenty-six, stands just under five feet five inches tall, and looks boyish enough to be a teen-ager, but wrinkles form beside his eyes when he smiles. The speck of a scar by his left eye is not from boxing but from a girl who once bullied him in school. He has sharp cheekbones, a thick brush of black hair, and a long, aquiline nose. Like most boxers, he alternates between two sizes: regular weight—in his case, a hundred and ten pounds—and fighting weight (a hundred and six pounds). Before each competition, he spends most of a month famished. He gets grumpy and irritable, and then apologizes. For distraction, he gnaws on watermelon slices and spits out the pulp. Or he pulls up pictures of lamb noodles and posts them on his blog.
His teammates were still outside the restaurant, window-shopping, but Zou took a seat at an empty table. He laid out a Chinese newspaper and scanned the headlines, with little interest. The bridge of his nose was puffy and blue from his last bout, a few hours earlier. He was still in his red-and-white team warmup suit with “China” embroidered in gold thread across the back. On his left breast he wore a small brass pin of Mao Zedong’s head—a gift from his coach, Zhang Chuanliang, whom he calls Teacher Zhang. After eight days of competition, Zou’s cheeks had hollowed, and his smile was tired. “I’m hungry,” he said in Chinese.
Zou could feast now. He had won that day, gaining his second world championship and confirming his place as the first boxer in Chinese history to be considered a contender for an Olympic gold medal. A few years ago, it was hard to imagine that a Chinese boxer could win anything. The sport was banned for decades, because Mao’s government considered it too violent and too Western. It wasn’t allowed until 1986, after sports authorities made a calculation: boxing has eleven weight classes, thereby providing dozens of medal opportunities. That means a lot to a government that has elevated the hunt for Olympic medals to a state religion, a faith never more fervent than today, as China prepares to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, in Beijing. Chinese boxing officials have a name for their objective: the “zero-gold-medal breakthrough.”
“Our target for the 2008 Olympics is explicit: one gold medal,” Chang Jianping, the president of the Chinese Boxing Association, told me. When the Beijing News asked Teacher Zhang, who is the team’s head boxing coach, what he thought of that prospect, he replied, “The entire national team has only one person really capable of capturing the gold: Zou Shiming.”
Zou’s first fight in Chicago fell during lunchtime, and the crowd was sparse. Only muffled thuds and the polyglot shouts of opposing cornermen broke the stillness of the arena, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on the city’s Near West Side. Two rings had been erected side by side, so that simultaneous fights could speed the opening rounds.
The world outside had intruded already. The Cuban team, from which two fighters have defected in recent years, was boycotting the competition, saying that it suspected a conspiracy by the “most vile interests of the United States and some of its allies: the theft of athletes.” Separately, two Ugandan fighters, including the team captain, had vanished from their hotel with their suitcases. One later called the coach to say, with apologies, that he was in Canada, but made no mention of returning home.
From the warmup area, Zou walked silently to the ring. The announcer stumbled over his name (“Sheeming Joe!”), to a polite flutter of applause. Zou slipped through the ropes. In his corner, in a hooded sweatshirt, stood Teacher Zhang, who looked so unprepossessing that he might have been a spectator who had stepped up for a closer look. Zhang coached martial arts until 1986, when he switched to boxing, and rose to the sport’s upper ranks. At fifty-four, he is trim and good-looking, with a brush cut that, like many Chinese men his age, he dyes an inky black. He has little appetite for conversation, but if he’s asked about fighting his eyes sparkle and he embarks on long, precise paragraphs. He has done more than anybody else to define China’s boxing style, yet he is so averse to attention that he can sometimes be found napping in the locker room during medal ceremonies while his fighters are on the podium. Zhang’s indifference to formality is unusual, to say the least, in China’s sports bureaucracy. “The leaders don’t like him,” a coach who has known him for many years says. “He has never kissed the leaders’ asses.” A trio of Chinese sports officials had filed in and taken ringside seats. Zou turned toward Zhang and embraced him for a long moment over the top rope, his glove curled around the older man’s head. After more than a decade with Teacher Zhang, Zou mentions him more often than he does his parents. “We’re like father and son,” Zou says. The hug is a pre-fight ritual. “It calms me down.”
Zou turned back to his opponent, a Romanian named Constantin Paraschiv. At the sound of the bell, Paraschiv came out in a hurry, his fists clamped beside his face in the upright style of the Europeans. He was energetic and aggressive, firing jabs and prompting Zou to backpedal around the ring or list from the waist. Zou looked uninspired. He threw few punches. He drifted clockwise around the ring, pursued by the Romanian. By the end of Round 1, Paraschiv led, three points to two, and Zou went back to his corner.
Teacher Zhang stood close to Zou’s face, spoke softly, and tipped a trickle of bottled water into his mouth. When the bell signalled the start of Round 2, Zou sprang forward and buried a left-right combination to even the score. He set his stance farther apart than before and bounced lightly on the balls of his feet. He scissored his legs, an homage to his idol, Muhammad Ali. His first round, it seemed, had been a warmup. He glided around Paraschiv, pausing only to flick a combination into the Romanian’s padded brow. Every time Paraschiv slung his fist, Zou eased out of the way and counterpunched. Paraschiv, pivoting and swinging in vain, did not score another point in the round. Or, for that matter, in either of the two rounds that followed.
Zou rarely knocks his opponents out. He batters them and darts out of reach, like an angry sparrow. Sometimes he holds his fists so low that they drop below his waist, a caricature of Ali. Zou is a light flyweight, the lightest weight class in the Olympics. But, even among boxers his size, Zou is known for exceptional speed. After he beat the Irish fighter Paddy Barnes, I asked Barnes what had happened. Zou’s left hand, he replied. “It’s that fast. I could hardly see it coming.” When the American Rau’shee Warren was on his way to losing to Zou in the 2004 Olympics, in Athens, Warren told his corner that he couldn’t keep up: “I’m telling the coach, ‘Dang, he can move, and I can’t catch him!’ “
By the final bell, Zou had scored thirteen punches on Paraschiv in a row, to win, 15–3. The Romanian was flushed and slumped. He had spent three rounds slugging air. After the referee held Zou’s arm aloft, Zou bowed to the judges and ducked through the ropes. He climbed down from the ring and headed for the front row, where the Chinese officials were seated. China’s boxing boss, Chang, a jolly, broad-faced man in a maroon blazer, sat with provincial sports officials. Zou greeted each with a two-handed shake, nodded at their comments, and thanked them. I came to recognize the ritual after every one of his fights in Chicago: the beeline to the officials at ringside, the two-handed shakes. Sweat pouring down his face, Zou listened closely to the men in suit jackets. Sports officials in China are among those who have a hand in shaping a top athlete’s future: where he lives, the terms by which he goes pro. On the evening news, they march in hard hats around new stadiums or huddle over blueprints. I wondered what they could possibly tell Zou about his fight that he didn’t know already. Zou’s emergence startled American boxing purists who have been slow to warm up to his style. After Zou’s fight, I asked the United States’ head coach, Dan Campbell, what he thought. “I didn’t think anything of him,” Campbell said. “He did the thing that he did in the Olympics, hitting with this part of his hand, and this part,” Campbell went on, gesturing dismissively to the sides of his fist.
That criticism doesn’t bother Teacher Zhang. Zou’s medals are the evidence he needs. “If he can win points,” Zhang said, “even if he can fight with you he won’t waste his energy.”
After the team arrived in Chicago, I met Zou one morning in his hotel. He was groggy. “I woke up at three-thirty this morning,” he said.
Until dawn, he had watched television shows that he couldn’t understand. It was his first trip to the United States, and so far he’d seen it only through the window of a bus. He has experienced much of the world that way: the best shuttle buses, hotel cafeterias, and gyms of Iran, the Czech Republic, Russia, Cuba, Qatar. He and the other Chinese boxers had skipped the opening ceremony, a couple of days earlier, because it would have meant standing around in the cold—only to learn later that they could have met Muhammad Ali, a surprise guest.
Zou sat forward in an oversized yellow leather armchair. Nearby, a large man in a golf shirt and a blazer laughed into his cell phone. Zou was carrying two cell phones, one of which was an iP he and a coach had hacked into it, with instructions they found online, to make it display Chinese characters. After he won a bronze medal at the Olympics in 2004, Unicom, a telecommunications company, gave him a free phone and allowed him to choose a number, and he chose one that ended with the digits 2008. Around the same time, Shanghai G.M., a joint venture with General Motors, gave him a silver Buick Excelle sedan. He made sure that the license plate also ended in 2008. Zou is unfailingly soft-spoken and polite, which, in a sport of swaggerers, can be mistaken for lack of confidence. It shouldn’t be. After routing a European amateur champion recently, Zou conceded, “He is good. Outstanding. But I am better.” I asked him how he pictures himself when he fights. “I think I’ve combined martial arts and boxing,” he said. “Martial arts have a soft and flexible side, and boxing is more direct. Putting them together is a specialty of Chinese boxing.” He prides himself on distinguishing China in a way that it has never enjoyed. “Opponents looked down upon Chinese players before,” he has said. “They were happy to take on a Chinese boxer, because we were too weak.
“Now they come and shake hands with you. The stronger you become, the more respect you get.”
If he weren’t a boxing champion, Zou figures, he might have been a fashion designer or a d.j. or a chef making French food—“romantic dishes,” he says. His musical tastes lean toward Hong Kong pop ballads, songs like “I Truly Cried” and “Rainbow Heaven.” Zou wishes that he had paid more attention in school and learned English, because it would make things easier when he turns pro—after the Olympics, most likely. Lots of young Chinese adopt English names, but Zou hasn’t found one. A primary-school teacher once persuaded him to call himself Car, but Zou suspected that it didn’t make much sense, and he abandoned it. Although he excelled in sports and music, he never did well in school, and he is self-conscious about the gaps in his education. He has no time for a girlfriend, he says, but he has decided that someday he will marry “a modern, knowledgeable woman.” As he puts it, “I hope to find another half who can make up for what I don’t have.”
Zou’s closest friend is Zang Guangyue, one of the team’s trainers, who rarely leaves his side. Zang is eight years older, wiser and more circumspect, with a round face and large eyes. He started his career with the national canoe-kayak team, before being transferred to boxing, in 2002. He knew little of the sport until Zou, working the heavy bag one day after practice, began showing him the fine points. Zang has spent the years since then managing Zou’s daily schedule, warming him up for workouts, and deflecting overzealous fans. Initially, Zang worked with the whole team, but he has gradually come to spend most of his time with Zou. When Zou can’t sleep before a big fight, Zang massages his scalp or reads aloud from a novel. “I never thought it would turn out that I picked the best horse,” Zang said. Around his teammates, Zou enjoys no special privileges, and although he has attracted more attention and glory than all of them combined, they betray no hint of jealousy. When I asked Gao Lingzi, another light fighter on the national team, about his first impression of Zou, Gao looked back at me, puzzled. “I worship him,” he said.
Zou was born in the mountain city of Zunyi, in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces. His parents lived and worked in a factory district that produced defense equipment under the ministry of aerospace. His father, Zou Jianguo (his given name means “build the nation”), was an engineer. He was gentle and remote, and worked relentlessly. When Zou’s mother, Song Yonghui, asked her husband to teach their son to swim at the factory pool, the young father couldn’t find a moment away from work. By the time he could, Zou had taught himself to dive. Song Yonghui said of her husband, “If Zou Shiming and I wanted to see him, it was difficult. He was up early, early, and away. He didn’t return until late, late.”
Now in his fifties, Zou Jianguo is slender, with a ripple of tidy black hair. At one point, he considered joining the Communist Party. “I tried, but I did not meet the Party’s standard,” he said. “I always tried. I always tried.” Zou’s mother was as outgoing as her husband was reserved. She was a kindergarten teacher in the factory school. She excelled at Ping-P he preferred basketball. Their son, an only child, was small for his age, and they kept him close to home. Song is energetic and has an impish smile. The first time I met her, in Zunyi, she was wearing a black-and-white checked shirt, a tailored black jacket, and bell-bottom black jeans with rhinestones on the pockets. When I asked about Zou’s upbringing, she laughed. “When he was little, he looked like a little girl, with his head of curly hair,” she said. Then she told a story to prove the point. “Once, on a Sunday, we went out with a friend and the friend’s daughter,” she said. “The girl wore a skirt. Zou Shiming was in a sailor shirt, riding a bicycle. The weather was good. So I said let’s go to a photo studio to take a picture. The girl looked rather like a boy and Zou Shiming looked like a little girl. So we swapped the clothes and Zou Shiming had a picture in a skirt.” She smiled. “My mother raised me too much like a girl,” Zou told me. “I couldn’t talk too loud. I couldn’t run or play around like other boys. Characteristics that should come out didn’t come out. I didn’t like to talk to people, maybe because my spirit was suppressed.” As he grew up, Zou discovered television martial-arts dramas about fabled swordsmen. One of his favorite heroes was Zhang Sanfeng, a Taoist mystic of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, who is considered the father of Tai Chi. Legend describes him as seven feet tall, with immense eyes and ears, and a fondness for clothes made of leaves.
Outdoors, Zou began to practice darting around trees and electrical poles, or threading through shoppers on busy streets. “I was crazy,” he said. “If you’d seen me on the street, you would have thought I had a problem.” He seemed interested only in sports, and when he was twelve his parents enrolled him in a private school to study wushu, a modern hybrid sport based on traditional martial arts. They expected him to end up as a physical-education teacher with a stable job and a pension. But Zou was bored by wushu, which he thought emphasized form over fighting. He was attracted to boxing, which seemed explosive and free. When Zou asked his mother if he could switch to boxing, she thought the idea was preposterous. “You are too delicate,” she recalls saying. “How can you train as a boxer?” And she added, “If you don’t want your mom to sleep at night, then go box.”
Zou told his parents that he would stick to martial arts, but he began training with the school boxing team. “I fell madly in love with boxing,” he said. “In the ring, I could truly let myself go. I wasn’t subject to my mother’s or anyone else’s control.” In 1995, Zou transferred to the Zunyi Sport School, one of China’s Soviet-style sports institutes. One July day, he showed up with nineteen hundred other children to try out for the school’s athletic teams. The boxing team had only four spots. First, the young athletes faced the measuring tape. Chinese coaches put extraordinary faith in assessing a child’s dimensions, sometimes with the help of X-rays, to deduce athletic potential. It was the system that identified the basketball star Yao Ming when he was a child. Boxing coaches were interested only in athletes with a long reach—that is, children whose wingspan exceeded their height by three centimetres. Zou’s outstretched arms measured a full centimetre less than his height, and the coaches cut him in the first round.
Two weeks later, Zou showed up for a second round of tryouts, and stood with the other applicants. “I thought, This kid’s clever and he’s willing to suffer,” Liang Feng, the coach who was running the tryouts, told me. Coach Liang, who boxed in college, is now in his mid-forties, and has a deep voice rasped by smoking. He favors a black leather jacket that makes him look like a night-club owner. Once when we went out to eat, he insisted that, as a guest, I down two glasses of beer before he touched his own.
Coach Liang put gloves on the boy and sent him in for a round. It was an unremarkable début. “He was frightened, timid,” Liang said. But Zou’s martial-arts training had given him good footwork, and he seemed to have a natural sense of distance, knowing how to lunge and withdraw to stay just out of his opponent’s reach. He was nimble and willing to train harder than the other rookies. “He was like a machine, just running without stopping,” Liang said. The coach took a chance and put Z a year later, in his first big tournament, he made it to the finals against a strong competitor. And then he buckled. “The whole fight, he ran around,” Liang said. “He didn’t dare to fight.”
Still, Coach Liang wasn’t ready to give up, believing that fear could be a form of protection. He had seen a number of more gifted athletes who seemed content to plod into heavy head shots, only to wind up getting hurt and leaving the sport. Zou was quick to avoid punches, and when an opponent’s fist withdrew he counterattacked. He was at the gym all day, every day, except for a few hours on Sunday. When nobody else showed up on the eve of Chinese New Year, he trained alone. When the arena was locked for the holiday, he and a friend hopped a fence to run on the track until a security guard chased them away. Coach Liang recommended him for the provincial team, and failed to mention his arm measurements. “If I didn’t hide that, it would be over,” Liang said.
Zou’s parents continued to disapprove of his boxing, and demanded that he stop. A coach paid them a visit at home. He emphasized the safety of headgear that is designed to protect amateur boxers against head injuries. He argued that Olympic boxing is not like the heavyweight prizefights on television. Whereas professionals pound each other in search of a knockout punch, Olympic boxers win most often on points, relying on speed and accuracy to land the most punches during four two-minute rounds. The coach also mentioned that his own son was boxing, which Zou’s mother found reassuring. “He told us that, in strong boxing countries like the United States and Cuba, children from the age of two or three can go to the boxing gym to train,” she said. “It’s like Ping-Pong in China.” Zou’s parents had no reason to be familiar with boxing. Western boxing, as it was known, had first appeared in the nineteen-twenties, in the port cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou, where foreign sailors were pitted against local fighters. The sport grew, unsupervised. In 1953, at a big competition in the northern city of Tianjin, a boxer died after a bout. Sports authorities were unnerved, and in 1959, as China organized its first national games, it dropped boxing from the lineup. Mao was driving his nation deeper into isolation: the Great Leap Forward, his disastrous push for an industrial breakthrough, was already heading toward a famine that killed more than thirty million people. The political atmosphere was increasingly hostile to Western imports. As Fan Hong, a scholar who specializes in China’s athletic history, puts it, “People believed that boxing was very brutal, very ruthless, and those were said to be the characteristics of capitalism. So it was banned.”
When the Cultural Revolution engulfed China, in 1966, the Communist Party banned competitive sports, and athletes who had won medals in the past found themselves accused of jinbiao zhuyi, or “trophy mania,” a charge of pursuing victory more zealously than Mao’s vision of mass fitness. The Ping-Pong champion Rong Guotuan, who had been greeted with parades a few years earlier, was detained on a trumped-up charge of spying and later hanged himself. Before his death, he wrote, “I love my reputation more than my life.” After the Cultural Revolution subsided, in 1969, China used Ping-Pong matches to reconnect with the world, sometimes throwing matches to promote a friendlier mood. It was not until the late nineteen-seventies that Deng Xiaoping decided that competition might be as good for athletics as it was for the economy. In December of 1979, Deng invited Muhammad Ali to the heavily guarded compound housing China’s top leaders. The champ hugged him. They sat. And the word went out. “Now the message was ‘If we want to win friends, if we want to win respect, we have to win medals,’ “ Fan said.
In the following decade, Chinese boxers began training again, after a fashion. “We had no bag or gloves,” Liu Gang, one of the earliest recruits and now a promoter, said. “In three months, I wore out two pairs of white cotton shoes. We punched sandbags.” Liu went on to the 1992 Olympics, in Barcelona, where competitors were delighted to face off against Chinese opponents. The best that their coaches hoped for was that each fighter might stay on his feet a bit longer than the one before him.
Today, as China transforms itself for the Olympics, Beijing is determined to broadcast a picture of prosperity. It is overhauling parts of the city that hadn’t changed much since the thirteenth century, razing miles of one-story brick alleys that Mongol conquerors designed to uniform widths of twelve or twenty-four paces. It is building a new world of vertical apartment complexes, with foreign names like the Greenwich and the Upper East Side. Underground, a web of subway lines has more than doubled in length in barely six years. Olympic guests will step through an airport terminal that will be the largest in the world. The torch relay will include 21,888 runners, more than any previous Olympics, and a stop at the peak of Mt. Everest. In this atmosphere, any feat of preparation seems plausible. One Chinese pork supplier vowed to produce specially pampered pigs, to insure that hormone-fed meat would not cause athletes to fail doping tests. Only after Chinese citizens began wondering about their own pork did a Beijing Olympic Committee spokesperson issue a “Clarification on Olympic Pig-Related Reports,” denouncing the pork story as an “exaggerated falsehood.” In the Games proper, China hopes to win more gold than ever before. At the founding of the People’s Republic, in 1949, no Chinese athlete had ever stood on an O by the close of the 2004 Summer Games, in Athens, China trailed only the United States, thirty-two to thirty-six, in that year’s gold medals. Chinese sports officials scrutinize, dissect, and forecast the medal race with an intensity that lends it the air of science—convinced that sufficient analysis will eventually engineer away the frailty of a diver in midair or a fighter in the ring. In 2000, Chinese officials launched the 119 Project, a campaign to win more gold medals in the Summer Games’ most competitive events—a list that by China’s calculation totalled a hundred and nineteen medals.
In Athens, China’s gold reflected its focus on producing an élite cadre of championship-level performers. Most Olympic delegations return home with more bronzes and silvers than golds. China achieved the opposite: for the most part, its athletes went to the top or they went nowhere. China now cultivates sports that it never cared about before, events that (like boxing) increase a medal count because they include various weight classes or categories. Sports officials groom champions in canoe-kayak and doubles tennis. Chinese athletes and coaches have also begun to defy their long-held belief that they can never best larger, taller Western competitors. And doing so is particularly glorious, as the sprinter Liu Xiang indicated after he won a gold medal in the hundred-and-ten-metre hurdles in Athens. “I believe I achieved a modest miracle for the yellow-skinned Chinese people and the Asian people,” he said afterward.
The élite athletes who bear the responsibility for realizing the country’s ambitions live in privileged isolation. Their talents are treated as public goods, but while they are practicing they live in secluded sports complexes, where they eat, sleep, and train under coaches’ instructions. If national-team members have endorsements, they are required to share the money with their team staff and the state. When the Olympic diving champion Guo Jingjing was criticized, two years ago, for having too many “commercial activities,” she appeared on state television to apologize. “I belong to the country,” she said. As a boxer, Zou is even more cloistered, because his sport sanctifies monastic training. At times, coaches confiscate his cell phones to eliminate distractions.
Soon after Zou made the Guizhou team, in 1996, Teacher Zhang began to notice his extraordinary work ethic. Zhang had set out to develop a distinct Chinese style of boxing. He was studying fighters from Cuba, Russia, and the U.S. “Asian people have different abilities and body types than Americans or Europeans,” Zhang told me last fall. “We have to fight with flexibility and fight with speed. Because, after all, you don’t often win by knocking people out. Fight with your mind. Fight with strategy.” After three years, Zhang was promoted to an assistant-coaching job on the national team, and Zou moved up as well, as a sparring partner. The training was taking a physical toll, but when he talked to his parents on the phone he reassured them: “I always said everything is fine, even when I was in great pain or my nose was bleeding.” In 2003, Zou won his first national championship and drew p he was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons in Guizhou Province and, later, a National Advanced Worker. Like other national champions, he joined the Communist Party.
Chinese reporters nicknamed him the Dark Horse at first. Later, they tried the Knight of Lightning or the Fox or, sometimes, the Pirate, all celebrating his knack for snatching points and peeling away from his opponents’ reach. That strategy was helping him win international matches. In Athens, Zou made it to the semifinals, eventually winning a bronze, China’s first in boxing. He captured headlines, but when he returned home his achievement paled against the frenzy over Liu Xiang’s gold in the hurdles. Zou’s loss in the semifinals began to feel like a failure. “Making a mistake in an event as grand as the Olympics, and to come so close to a gold medal, is a feeling that is inscribed into your bones and printed on your heart,” he told me. It was another year before Zou won his first gold medal, at the 2005 world championships, held in the western Chinese city of Mianyang. He was the nation’s first amateur boxing champion, and China celebrated. For him, the lesson was unmistakable: “You must win the championship in order to get acknowledgment.” The following year, Zou started a blog where he posted his diary entries and photographs. Entering the site triggers a twinkling piano tune, the first in a long loop of his favorite songs. A few hours after he posted his first message, a fan wrote, “You are the pride of the Chinese people!” Some days, Zou writes about fighting (“I’m fully confident that in tomorrow’s combat I cannot fail!”). On others, he posts a picture of himself strolling on a beach or flying a kite. He writes of his struggles: “Often, when I sleep, my legs don’t know where to go. No matter how I lie, I can’t sleep comfortably. Worst of all, in a flash, the whistle blows and it’s time to get out of bed again to train.” After twelve one night in the winter of 2006, he wrote, “This week’s training has been really tough, and the added intensity is bringing out accumulated years’ worth of pain, to the point that my back hurts so much it is keeping me awake.” It was a week before the Chinese New Year, the most important family holiday, and he was spending it, once again, at a training center far from home. “The thought of the pain and homesickness troubles my mind. It’s late at night, I’m still unable to sleep, and I really want to find a good friend to chat with, but I feel bad to bother them. So I’ll just pour out my heart to everyone, and hope people encourage me to shake off this spell of being down!” He received five comments immediately. Someone using the name A Secret Supporter wrote, “I, too, am far from home, and I know what you are experiencing.” In Chicago, Zou finally had a chance to get out of the hotel. He devoured his first lobster. He wandered down to the edge of Lake Michigan, where the autumn wind lashed at his gym clothes. In the arena, the local Chinese consulate organized a cheering section, which worked in shifts, handing out homemade placards bearing the Chinese characters for “Add oil!”—Chinese for “Let’s go!” None of the diplomats and visiting students involved knew much about boxing, but they saw themselves as participants in China’s effort to express itself. “I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about China in Western culture,” Bai He, a Ph.D. student in medical chemistry, told me. “They think China is very underdeveloped and they don’t have any idea of what China is like.”
Zou won the Chicago championship with ease. In his final match, he routed a Filipino, 17–3. Even Dan Campbell, the American coach, said that he was impressed. After the national anthems, Zou wandered through the halls of the arena but drew little notice from the American fans streaming past. China’s state news service once ranked him No. 4 on the list of the nation’s top athletes, three places behind Yao Ming, but outside of China Zou remains virtually unknown. When Chinese-Americans stopped him for autographs and snapshots, he seemed startled. He spent most of the time frozen in a half-smile and let them do the talking. “This is going on my wall,” Ray Liu, a fifteen-year-old from the Chicago suburbs, said, autograph in hand. “I wrestle,” Liu explained. “He’s a model.” Then he turned to Zou and said, in loud English, “You’re a model!”
That night, I asked Zou what he planned to do now that the competition was over. “After I report back, I’ll have dinner with my family, visit my grandparents,” he said. “When that’s taken care of, I’d like to take my bags and go someplace with a beautiful view, someplace quiet, like a tall mountain or a big ocean, to relax from the pressure of a long competition.” He was outlining a trip that he knew he had no time to take. “Then I’ll throw myself back into training.” In addition to Zou’s gold medal, China had won four bronzes, its best finish ever. When the team landed in Beijing, on November 5th, after an all-night flight, Chinese reporters were waiting for Zou in the terminal. They gave him bouquets of flowers and launched an impromptu press conference around his luggage cart. The next morning’s Beijing News carried a story about his return, headlined with a quote: “We Told the World with Our Fists That China Is Strong.”
If Zou’s home town were in the United States, its seven million people would make it America’s second-largest city, but Zunyi doesn’t have an airport, so when teams from China, Kazakhstan, and the United States arrived in late November for a friendly competition they landed in Chongqing, a three-hour flight from Beijing. From there, they took a three-hour bus ride through mountain tunnels and gullies, around terraced fields, and into the clanging center of Zunyi.
Inland Chinese cities live in a parallel world of brands and icons. Stores are named to carry a whiff of foreignness: Toskany for belts and purses, Ochirly for clothes, Dico’s for fast food. The area around Zunyi has one famous export: Moutai, also called Maotai, the national firewater that is served to summiting Presidents and Prime Ministers. (After visiting China, Richard Nixon tried to show his daughter how strong the stuff was by putting
he set the table on fire, according to Henry Kissinger.) Here, in the nineteen-thirties, Mao won a struggle for control of the Long March. Today, the city does a fine business in celebrating the Communist revolution. Banners welcome “Red Tourists” by the busload, who buy memorabilia and file past the spartan bedroom and thin mattress where Mao, whose image is omnipresent, slept.
Zou’s picture was almost as prevalent: on the front page of the Zunyi Evening News, on cardboard cutouts beside restaurants that serve bumblebee larvae, a local delicacy. The fa?ade of the Fuyuan Hotel was plastered with two huge posters of Zou in the ring. In English and Chinese, they said, “Welcome to the Return of the King from Victory.” It was Zou’s first competition here in years, and the event was to last three days. His face was printed on the tickets. His first opponent was a Kazakh. The match wa midway through the second round, Zou was pummelling the hapless man, 20–0, when the referee stopped the fight. Zou waved to the audience and jogged back to the sanctuary of his locker room. Fights were still under way, but a frenzied crowd of kids began to mass outside the locker-room door, which was guarded by police, except for the police who wandered inside to ask Zou for his autograph. “Get changed!” Teacher Zhang murmured. “If you wait until the end, it will be hard to leave. This is a small town.” The door opened a crack, revealing a wall of young, reddened faces pressed against a policeman’s outstretched arm. The door slammed shut. Zou stepped out of his trunks and pulled on jeans and a Brazilian soccer jersey. The room smelled of sweat and garlic. From the sound of it, the crowd outside was growing. He looked at his coach. They were, for the moment, trapped. Well-wishers had left giant bouquets of flowers on the table in the locker room, so Zou grabbed two of them and held them in front of his face as a shield. And then he and his coach pressed into the maw of the crowd. Teen-agers swarmed, jostling and shouting. Zou smiled and thanked them but pushed forward. By the time he had squeezed into the stairwell and down to a waiting bus, the bouquets were shredded.
The next day, Zou and his parents visited relatives in town. They climbed the steps to a modest two-bedroom apartment where the entry was filled with a large empty fish tank and a folded treadmill. The apartment was decorated, more or less, with Zou: a wall poster of his face beneath the phrase “Everything for 2008”; a poem written in calligraphy by another relative, which ended, “Surprise the whole world in year 2008.” Looking at it, I wondered how they would redecorate once the Olympics were over. As we walked to lunch that day, I asked Zou if his body was holding up. His back and his foot have been bothering him for months. (He had told a Chinese reporter, “After endurance runs, I lie on the ground, and I can’t tell the tears from the sweat.”) “It’s painful,” he said. “But there’s no time for surgery before the Olympics. That will have to wait.” I once asked him how it felt to live his life suspended between future success and failure. “I absolutely can’t allow such a heavy burden to feel like it’s suffocating me, or I will bring those worries into the ring,” he said.
The following night, in the final, Zou faced Luis Yanez, a confident, experienced nineteen-year-old from Duncanville, Texas, who had won a succession of amateur titles on his way to the American Olympic team. His father had taken him to the gym as an eight-year-old, and he had thrived. In high school, he had divided his time between boxing and waiting tables at the Blue Moon Café, in nearby Lewisville. After years of hearing about Zou, he had a strategy: “He drops his hands a lot and holds his hands down, and I got a quick jab, so if I just keep my jab out there in his face he won’t have them down there no more,” Yanez told me. “But he’s a good little fighter. He’s slick.”
The arena holds about five thousand people, and that night it was packed. The walls did not meet the roof, an the ring-card girls huddled in down parkas during the rounds. The city had made special preparations for its foreign guests: officials were identified with signs intended to be bilingual. A Chinese sign indicated the “Arbitrator’s Seat.” The English letters below read “Arditrator eat.” Not that the American team was unaccustomed to c team members had spent part of the day at a pharmacy trying to mime the symptoms of a stomach ailment.
Zou jogged out of the locker room draped in a golden robe, his face hidden beneath the hood. Only his gloves were visible, firing jabs into the cool night air. High over his head, a banner along the rafters ran the length of the stadium wall, with an enormous picture of him in mid-fight. When the announcer said his name, the crowd went berserk. On the upper deck, a man unfurled a red Chinese flag as big as a bedsheet, and Zou’s cardboard-blow-up face danced in the crowd. Teacher Zhang had warned him before the fight not to let the attention affect him. “Don’t try to prove anything or show off,” Zhang said. “Be yourself, and you’ll be fine.” Yanez came out with no robe, jogging and sidestepping toward the ring, flicking his gloves over his shoulders as if trying to shoo away an insect. He climbed through the ropes, jogged in place, and settled into a half-crouch to wait for the bell. The two surged into each other. They wrestled and bear-hugged, tying each other up in headlocks. The referee pulled them apart, and Zou buried a combination into Yanez’s head. The crowd loved it. Yanez responded with a broad hook that missed by a foot.
Zou settled into a rhythm, and his fists dropped to his waist, his gloves rolling loosely up and down, as if he were a timpani drummer, rising only to peck at Yanez’s temples. Yanez grew frustrated. He lunged, angrily, but landed few punches. When the first round ended, Zou led, 8–1. He turned back to his corner. He waved away his stool and stood facing into the ring, his arms splayed comfortably on the top rope. He looked at home there. It occurred to me that he has been boxing almost half his life.
The second round drifted farther out of Yanez’s grasp. Zou racked up points, setting his feet to hit hard now, intent on landing a big punch. He held his hands so low that they dropped behind his back, pleading with Yanez to open himself up. As Round 3 ticked down, Yanez was frantic, swinging broad hooks through the air. He looked, suddenly, like a child. Zou stretched his lead to nineteen points. The bell sounded. With his chest heaving, Yanez plodded back to his corner, but the American coach was already nodding to the referee. Zou thrust his fists into the air. The audience erupted and began pouring toward the ring. The fighters shook hands and Yanez slipped away, unnoticed. Zou put on his golden robe, brilliant in the ring lights, and stood alone, arms raised in the center of the canvas. He turned and faced the crowd of his countrymen, hundreds of them pressed against the edge of the ring, cell phones aloft, snapping pictures. Zou seemed at peace with the knowledge that his country’s self-regard hinges on a single fight in his future, on a single medal. He has come of age in China’s system, and, if it chafes him, he doesn’t readily admit to it. Like the pressure born of his talent, his role as a political symbol seemed to be something he accepted long ago, something larger than he is. ?
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