That promise by her coach, she says, helped her endure a brutal training regime in which she and other runners had no contact with the outside world and no one to protect them from the coach, who beat them with a whip or baton, or knocked them off their feet with the bumper of his car if he thought they were slacking off. But four years after she retired at 26 with nothing but an elementary school education and a body crippled by sports injuries, the former marathon champion says she has been duped.

This article has so many angles upon which to post about. There’s the my common rant about the Chinese custom of treating youth as mindless blobs of mush to be shaped by any adult (parent, teacher, coach) which inevitably leads to their manipulation or the uplifting point in the article that “rule of law” principles are making there way albeit slowly into the contemporary Chinese psyche or the age-old exploitation of the Chinese poor peasant for national (but not necessarily to the peasant individual or local) benefits or the equally timeless custom of “when your in favor of the emperor no one will speak bad of you but when your guanxi runs dry not even a dog will give you a pass” or the unbelievable ability of many Chinese to “chi ku” in the hopes that they will finally get to a mountaintop that may not be what they persoanlly believed to be ther salvation.

Chinese athletes are run into the ground