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No Thanking the Motherland: Free spirit
No Thanking the Motherland: Free spirit
http://www.economist.com/news/ch ... houlder-free-spirit
[color="red"]Photo 1: Li Na after winning
Photo 2: Li Na to Communist Party: Drop Dead. 装死
A tennis star gives officials the cold shoulder
Feb 1st 2014 | From the print edition
UPON winning the women’s singles title at the Australian Open on January 25th, Li Na stood up (above) and gave a touching, witty speech in English. She teased her husband, thanked her fans and praised her agent for making her rich. Since winning the French Open in 2011, she has secured endorsements worth $40m, making her the third-best-paid female athlete in the world.
There were no thanks, however, for “the motherland”, a fact that did not go unnoticed back home. Xinhua, the official news agency, suggested her success “would not have been possible without her time on the national team”.
The opposite may be true. Ms Li, who turns 32 next month, spent her early years in spartan sports schools, but fled the system in 2002, sick of the pressure. She went to university and forgot about tennis, before being coaxed back under a deal known as danfei, or “flying solo”. She was permitted to choose her coach and retain 90% of her earnings, rather than give more than half to the state.
Ms Li’s memories of the system appear not to have left her. After her win, she flew to her hometown of Wuhan to be greeted by local officials, who presented her with a cheque for 800,000 yuan ($132,000). A screenshot of Ms Li holding the cheque, stony-faced, has circulated on the internet to much amusement. Her stick-it-to-the-system attitude has made her popular at home, with a following on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, of 22m.
The spindoctors of Chinese soft power might do well to note that success and popularity sometimes come not in state-owned packaging, but in the form of a mercurial, tattooed free bird, flying solo. |
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