Word: zhengs
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...Zheng Jie, it all came down to the nifty clothes. A lot of youngsters fall in love with tennis because of the exhilaration of a perfect ace or the thrilling geometry of a well-placed volley. But when Zheng was growing up in China's rural Sichuan province, she knew little about the game. The coaches who approached her in 1990, when she was seven years old, had to explain that tennis was like ping-pong, only with a bigger, fuzzier ball. Still, there were advantages to playing this strange sport. "Because my teammates and I were among the first...
...yellow jersey and black pants that Zheng wore to practice during a recent national-team training session in southern China's Jiangmen city were hardly flashy, but the future of Chinese women's tennis may soon shine as brightly as a sequined Serena Williams ensemble. In 2002, there was not a single Chinese in the top 100 of the WTA tour. Last year, there were three in the top 50. The breakout moment for Chinese women's tennis came in 2004 when a hitherto unknown Chinese duo struck doubles gold at the Athens Olympics. Even the tennis cognoscenti, who easily...
Nothing in Zheng Yichun's upbringing foreshadowed his landing in a political prison. His English-speaking father interrogated captured American G.I.s during the Korean War, and as a teenager two decades later, Zheng led his middle school's Communist Youth League. Only when the reform era hit China in the 1980s did the aspiring poet have what his family calls an "awakening." China's leaders were corrupt and tyrannical, he said, and he would fight them with words. Yet despite the provocative title of his self-published 2002 collection of poems, The Era of Brainwashing, his work went mostly unnoticed...
...Zheng also shared his thoughts on overseas Chinese-language websites. China's one-party system is "the root of all evil," he wrote in an essay that was one of 63 signed articles he posted on dajiyuan.com, a website popular among Chinese intellectuals. Even though Web surfers in China can't normally access dajiyuan.com$#8212;it's among a long list of sites blacklisted by government censors$#8212;police arrested Zheng last December on charges of inciting subversion. On Sept. 22, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. Beijing had once again sent a stern message to Chinese...
...Zheng's arrest shows, China's taming of the Internet depends more on old-fashioned muscle than on new technology. Above all, Beijing maintains control by instilling the fear in Web scribes and online businesses that they are being watched?and that, if they cross the line, they are risking their investment, their business, even their freedom. The threat is real: Human Rights Watch estimates that 60 Chinese are serving prison sentences for Internet-based political crimes, and Beijing frequently closes down websites operating on Chinese soil whose owners allow controversial postings...