BEIJING – China’s sports system has been enormously successful since the country returned to the Olympic fold in 1980, culminating with the host nation topping the medals’ table at the 2008 Beijing Olympics with only a slight dip into second place behind the United States in London four years later.

And yet, with the Rio de Janeiro Games less than three months away, the system is beginning to break down due to the shifting demographics of a more prosperous nation.

Change is unfolding at Shanghai’s No. 1 Children’s Sports School Pudong New Area, a small cog in a state-run machine that has churned out Chinese Olympic champions for 31/2 decades.

The institution is one of 2,183 around the country producing 95 per cent of its Olympians.

Fewer parents are willing to let their children endure gruelling training routines from as young as six years of age, leading to a fall in student numbers.

Some schools have closed and others are adjusting the way they work. The number of sports schools is down from 3,687 in 1990, government numbers show.

“In the 1980s and 1990s, schools like ours were extremely attractive,” said Mr Huang Qin, the school’s party committee secretary, recalling a time when families were poorer and generous sports subsidies were more highly prized.

The school’s alumni include former Olympians such as hurdler Chen Yanhao and female footballer Xie Huilin.

“(But) parents are less willing now to send their child to sports schools if they perform fairly well in exams… The source of students for sports schools has shrunk as society places more importance on cultural education.”

Mini-athletes train to fulfil China’s sporting obsession

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Reuters

Debates about the continued relevance of the sports school system began to emerge around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Mr Huang and other schools said, as emerging tales of difficulties facing retired athletes jarred against rising expectations of education standards among China’s booming middle class.

The country’s declining birth rate as a result of China’s one-child policy has not helped either, along with its cut-throat education system, which sees Chinese students spend twice as much time on homework a day compared with the global average. |

A BETTER WAY

Beijing responded to these concerns in 2010 by issuing a new policy, known as Document 23, ordering sport schools to improve teaching standards and to give more support to retired athletes.

At the No. 1 Children’s Sports School Pudong New Area, Mr Huang said it had improved its teacher training. Three years ago, it also relaxed a 40-year tradition of requiring its entire student cohort to study, train and live full-time on campus. Now, more than half of the school’s 700 athletes study at other schools as well. Of its remaining 300 or so full-time students, about 10 per cent live off-campus.

Other schools, like the Shanghai Yangpu Youth Amateur Athletic School, are going into kindergartens to advertise gymnastics as an after-school play-time activity to parents.

“We call it happy gymnastics,” said principal Zhu Zengxiang.

At Beijing’s Shichahai, its walls adorned with posters extolling the feats of former students turned Olympic champions, vice-head Zhang Jing said the school offers “comprehensive development” and equips athletes with the skills needed for life after sport.

The Shanghai Sports School, whose alumni include former Olympic swimming champion Liu Zige, began in 2012 to reject athletes that did not pass its academic entrance exams, and tells parents it wants to use sports training to educate rather than as an end-goal, according to principal Sheng Maowu.

“A lot of sports schools are moving in this direction… but this is a painful process,” he said.

“At present, the existing thought is that education and training are two different routes – if you want to be a world champion, you cannot study. This belief is wrong… and, at the end of the day, very few become champions.”

The government does not publish student enrolment at its sports schools, but there are signs that the changing landscape has already begun to impact China’s pool of sporting talent.

In April, the China Sports Daily reported that the number of Chinese athletes training to be table tennis players had fallen by almost a quarter since 1987 to 23,266.

“In this changing situation, we must re-examine the traditional training system and model for competitive sports,” Mr Liu Shaonong, head of the table tennis and badminton centre of China’s General Administration of Sport, was quoted as saying.

Reform, however, is proving slow to take root. In March, a government survey found that some schools inspected across nine cities and provinces did not spend enough on education, and some local education departments paid little attention to making improvements in line with Document 23, according to state media.

But athletes like Wang Linwen, a 25-year-old former professional athlete who represented Shanxi province in wushu, a martial art, said reforms, no matter how little, were crucial for those still willing to enter sports schools.

For five years until she retired in 2009, her weekdays were spent training, with only the weekends for studying, she said.

“I lost a lot because I didn’t experience the education system,” she said. “(Reform) is good. That way, sports school students won’t come out knowing nothing.”

YANGON – Disabled and collecting fees to use a public toilet in a busy Yangon market was not how Kyaw Kyaw Oo imagined the life of a soldier when he lied about his age to join the Myanmar army at 16.

Four years later, a landmine blast tore through his legs during fighting in the country’s east. He nearly died from an infection after an eight-day journey to hospital and lost both his legs.

Discharged in 1999, he was unemployed and living at home, relying on his aging parents for support. In 2008 he moved to Yangon, the country’s largest city, where an official “had pity”on him and helped him get a job at the market.

For some 60 years, Myanmar has been in a state of perpetual civil war, with multiple ethnic armed groups killing and maiming unknown thousands of soldiers. With military casualties a closely guarded secret, wounded veterans were kept largely out of public view. “If we didn’t have someone to depend on, like parents, things would have been very bad for us,” said Kyaw Kyaw Oo.

Now, amid rapid economic and social reforms that began in 2011, the cost of years of fighting is slowly being revealed.

Wounded former soldiers, with few job opportunities, are reliant on a veterans’ assistance scheme that offers minimal medical care or financial support.

A new government led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) knows it must work with former foes from the military high command, who remain powerful under a constitution written by the armed forces.

But rank-and-file veterans of Myanmar’s long-running conflicts fear being left on the margins of the transformation taking place around them.

ARMY RULE

Myanmar’s military ran the country from a coup in 1962 until it relinquished direct control in 2011.

Many top junta members amassed great wealth, visible now in high-end enclaves of Yangon, where mansions rise behind barbed-wire topped walls, and the sprawling compounds in the capital Naypyitaw.

Aung Gyi, 56, who also lost both of his legs to a landmine in 1979 battling communists, lives a drastically different life.

Like Kyaw Kyaw Oo and around 50 other wounded soldiers, he was given his home a 45-minute drive outside Yangon in 2012.

The neighbourhood, bureaucratically titled, “Ward-6, Agriculture and Livestock-1”, has provided the wounded veterans who live there with a sense of community, residents said.

On a recent day, a barber with an aging artificial leg visible beneath his longyi – a traditional sarong worn by men – sat outside his shop chatting with friends. Another man limped behind a toddler running down the road.

But the single room homes lack indoor toilets and have no special features to accommodate the residents’ disabilities.

Aung Gyi, who shares his with five family members, receives 40,000 kyat (S$45) per month from the military.

He recognises, nonetheless, that he is more fortunate than most. “There are many wounded veterans who still don’t have a place to live,” he said.

FUNDING SCARCE

The NLD, which faces sky-high expectations that it can rapidly transform a country impoverished by decades of junta rule, is unlikely to find much extra cash for veterans. “We don’t have any special plan giving any assistance to the disabled veterans, we only help former political prisoners,” Han Tha Myint, an NLD central executive committee member, told Reuters. “We can’t afford to do much.” An official from the Myanmar War Veterans Organisation in Naypyitaw, which oversees veterans’ affairs, said there were currently 250,000 veterans registered with the group.

Around 10,000 were wounded in combat, said the official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media, adding that funding remained a “major problem”.

The MWVO had tried to stop some homeless veterans begging or selling used book on the streets in Yangon, the official said. “We invite them to join our organisation so that we can help with whatever assistance we can afford,” said the official.

Kyaw Kyaw Oo lost his job at the market in 2013, when the officer who helped to get him hired left. He began selling lottery tickets from his homemade wheelchair, but struggles to travel between downtown Yangon and his home outside the city. “I think we deserve more assistance from the state,” said Kyaw Kyaw Oo, who had followed his father and two uncles into the army. “I believe my family and I sacrificed a lot for the country.”

OSAKA – AN AIR purifier that filters out not only airborne pollutants, but also mosquitoes, is drawing attention in Japan.

The dual-function device, released by Sharp, has been selling exceptionally well.

Called Katori Kusei, the air purifier works by sucking in mosquitoes along with pollen and dust.

It has an ultraviolet light to lure mosquitoes and an adhesive sheet that traps them.

Advance orders for the product were 10 times more than what the firm usually receives.

This is despite the lack of TV commercials for the product since it was released on April 23. The company had been tightening its purse strings due to financial issues.

To cater to the unexpected demand, Sharp has now trebled its production from the initial 3,000 units a month.

One unit retails for around 50,000 yen (S$639) plus tax.

The model was initially targeted at customers in South-east Asia, such as Malaysia and Singapore, where mosquitoes are a nuisance.

In Japan, the sales of air purifiers tend to taper off once the hay fever season of early spring is over.

But the Katori Kusei has bucked the trend. It was a hot topic online immediately after Sharp announced the product on March 17.

The firm usually gets up to 200 advance orders for conventional air purifiers but the demand for Katori Kusei had shot up to 2,300 units the day before its release.

According to Yodobashi Camera’s Umeda Store in Osaka, customers in their 50s and 60s show the most interest in the product.

The in-store display, which demonstrates the mosquito-catching function, appears to attract many customers who stop and look out of curiosity.

But another leading home appliance maker downplayed the product’s popularity, saying: “It was simply because the release coincided with social anxiety over Zika virus.”

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