China has about 23 million tennis players and exactly one Olympic singles champion: Qinwen Zheng. She has a nickname, Queenwen, which is either a lame play on her name or it says something. I suspect it says something. At the Paris Olympics, she won her first-round match against Sara Errani 6-0, 6-0. In the third round, she defeated American Emma Navarro and then engaged in a long exchange with Navarro at the net. “I just told her I don’t respect her as a competitor,” Navarro told reporters. “I think she’s pretty ruthless about things.” Zheng responded ruthlessly: “I’m not going to take it as an attack, because she lost the match.” In the next round, she retired three-time Grand Slam winner Angelique Kerber. Then came Iga Świątek, the world No. 1 and four-time French Open champion, on Świątek’s favorite surface, the red clay of Roland-Garros. Zheng had lost all six previous encounters against Świątek. Zheng won in straight sets, “driven,” she later said, “by sheer determination” and a desire to bring honor to her country. She defeated Donna Vekić, a Wimbledon semifinalist, to win gold.

The challenge, she said on the eve of the US Open, was to keep up the motivation. In January, Zheng had reached the final of the Australian Open but was overwhelmed there by Aryna Sabalenka and then failed to make it past the round of 16 in eight of her next 10 tournaments. After the Olympics, she wanted to develop consistency and mental toughness. The athleticism was beyond question: Zheng is big, fast and strong, with a powerful forehand with strong topspin. What she really needed was some serves. Zheng has a quirk on her serve that stands out like a beauty spot: It just exaggerates the elegance of her serve motion. When Zheng makes her first serves, they are almost untouchable. The problem is that she often misses them – and her second serve is worse than most. In her first two matches in New York, she lost the first set, largely due to unreliable serves. Both times, she won the next two sets by making dramatically more first serves. In the second round, a win over Erika Andreeva, she had twenty aces.

What Zheng’s first serve percentage means for the global health of tennis may be an odd question, but it’s certainly something actuaries are mulling over. When Li Na became the first Chinese player to win a Grand Slam singles title at the French Open in 2011, 116 million people watched in China. After her victory, sponsors vied to tap into that huge market. Western coaches moved to China to set up new academies. In 2019, the Women’s Tennis Association held more tournaments in China — 10 — than in the United States, and China hosted the WTA Finals in Shenzhen that year, whose total prize money dwarfed that of the men’s event held in London that year.

Zheng was 11 when Li won her second Grand Slam title at the 2014 Australian Open. Zheng says the event planted a “seed of a dream” in her heart. By then, she had already been living for several years at a tennis academy in Wuhan, 350 kilometers from her hometown. Her father had taken her there as a child to be evaluated by a coach, and when the coach accepted, he surprised her by leaving her there. Thousands of other Chinese children could tell the same story. Decades earlier, the government had built a state-funded system of sports schools modeled on the Soviet Union, cherry-picking promising children from their families and nurturing their talents for China’s glory – a system that may have culminated in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Yet even then there were some suggestions, including within the political elite, that the country’s attitude to sport needed to evolve. In part this meant adapting to the new ambitions of an emerging middle class with more disposable income and time to play and follow sport. In part it was down to Li Na herself, who had defied and eventually broken away from the state system. The system traditionally controlled the tournaments its players competed in and required players to give a large percentage of their professional earnings to the state. Her arrangement, in which she set her own schedule, chose her own coaches and kept much of her money, was known as “going solo.” Li had a sometimes contentious relationship with China’s state press. But she was charismatic, witty, magnetic and popular not only abroad but with a younger generation in China who called her “Big Sister Na.” Zheng was one of them. She idolized Li, then emulated her, moving to Beijing to train with Li’s former coach. Then, in 2019, she and her mother moved to Barcelona; she was one of several Chinese players who left the country to pursue their tennis ambitions. No one seemed to question her.

The WTA made no secret of its focus on the Asian market, especially China. Then came the pandemic and China’s zeroCOVID policies that banned the tours from the country, and in November 2021, a post on the social media platform Weibo in which popular tennis player Peng Shuai accused a former Chinese vice premier of sexually harassing her. The post was deleted, the discussion censored, and Peng officially recanted, but she also largely disappeared from the public eye. The WTA, which has always prided itself on its pioneering commitment to women’s rights, announced it would move the tour out of China until it could be assured of Peng’s safety. It maintained that stance even as it became clear that the organization’s finances were in shambles – most evidently with recent finals, which shuttled from Guadalajara to Fort Worth in 2021, Cancun in 2022, and 2023. Finally, last year, the WTA admitted its boycott had failed. Peng’s fate was still a mystery, but the tour would return to China.

Zheng was named the 2022 WTA Newcomer of the Year. She spoke neither of Peng nor of China and, at least publicly, seemed unfazed by the controversy. She was also in company: Chinese women were rising in the rankings, and now Chinese men too. Last year, Wu Yibing, a male Chinese player, won an ATP tournament in Dallas. Wimbledon this year featured 11 Chinese players in the men’s and women’s main draws – more than any other major ever. China now has six players in the WTA’s top 100, led by Zheng at No. 7. Wang Yafan is also still in contention at the US Open after beating Victoria Azarenka on Friday to reach the round of 16.

In August, after Zheng’s Olympic victory, President Xi Jinping praised her, particularly her patriotic comments after winning the gold medal. Shortly afterward, Zheng flew to China from Cincinnati, where she had been competing in a tournament, to attend a ceremony with Xi. On Friday in New York, Zheng won her third-round match against Jule Niemeier 6-2, 6-1, winning 21 of the 25 points in which she got a first serve in play. If she does well at this year’s US Open – even without her Olympic victory, which earned her no ranking points – she will have a chance to qualify for a spot in the WTA Finals, which features the year’s eight most successful players. The event will not be held in Shenzhen, however. The tour is still paying for its principled stance in China. It was recently announced that the finals will be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, instead this year. ♦