Illustration: Liu Rui

By David Yang

With the Olympics now a year past, top Chinese athletes are gathering once again in Shandong Province to compete in the nation's premier sports event, the National Games, which has been held every four years since 1975. The 11th Games started officially on October 16 in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong.

Like previous National Games, the media is abuzz with coverage of match-fixing, age-faking, and other scandals.

Earlier this month, a front page story in Chengdu Business Daily caused a sensation when a judge in the diving competition accused Zhou Jihong, head coach of China's national diving team, of controlling the judging panel and manipulating the result of the finals. The judge, speaking under a false name, said she's now retired and has nothing to be afraid of.

The accusations were denied by China's sports officials, saying it's "impossible, irresponsible and groundless," without mentioning any possible investigation into the case.

According to them, match-fixing is simply "impossible" at the Shandong Natioanl Games, even though scandals such as doping and match-fixing were exposed four years ago during the 10th National Games in Jiangsu Province.

The public has reasons to doubt the results, as the accusations came from a judge who served for decades in the taxpayer-funded sports system.

If the organizers meant it when they chose the slogan as "Harmonious China, People's Games," then the people here deserve a better answer.

Strangely, the central level media has kept silent on the issue, which makes it all the more doubtful.

Match-fixing is not new in China. Its presence has been reported in Chinese football and, more recently, basketball. And it's not the only problem that blemishes sport in this country. Age-faking is another.

For decades, Chinese sports administrators focused on getting more and more gold medals at the Olympics, rather than paying attention to the grass roots. This caused fierce competition among provincial sports teams in the 1980s, when age-faking became a severe problem.

The results-driven sports system made older players lie about their ages to compete in a lower-age category, an unwritten rule in China's sports world for years, if not decades.

To get better funding and job opportunities, coaches in ground level of sports schools take care of this age shaving work for the kids. And the problem spirals and follows the athletes from the start of their burgeoning careers.

The lack of an up-to-date sports law worsened this problem, along with the face-saving Chinese culture.

Actually, many Chinese, according to Zhai Xuewei, a sociology professor at Nanjing University, do not feel ashamed of their lies as long as they aren't exposed.

Last year, after continuous prodding from the media, the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) said they found 26 players who had inaccurately registered their ages in CBA, the country's top-tier basketball league.

But not a single player was blamed or punished for the fraud, as "falsifying your age is an issue best left to the past," according to Liu Xiaonong, a CBA chief.

I happened to attend the same elementary school as two CBA players who, after the association's findings, were still listed as at least four years younger than they are. The problem has not gone away.

Earlier this March, the Sports Bureau of Guangdong Province conducted a series of x-ray bone tests on 15,000 youth athletes and found one-fifth of them to be older then they claimed. What about other places in the country?

In a speech at the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference before the Beijing Olympic Games last year, Deng Yaping, former Olympic champion of table tennis, said the Games can "cultivate China's soft power, which represents an integrated influence in its foreign policy, culture, ethical standard, and philosophy."

Match-fixing and age-faking, in contrast, contribute to a breakdown in sports ethics in China that has been projecting a very bad image for the country abroad. They have hurt the most basic rule in any sports competition: fair play.

"As a child, my participation in athletics had revolved around my father, not a sports school, and his most important lessons were often counter-intuitive: that it was better to lose with class than win at all cost." Peter Hessler wrote in his book Oracle Bones.

I thought of his words when watching the fancy fireworks at the opening ceremony of the National Games, feeling sad for our young players who don't have any choice when forced to get their ages changed.

Please, for the sake of the kids, can we just be honest?

The author is the editor of www. chinasportsreview.com