It was Mao Tsetung who first declared table tennis China's national sport and one year after, in 1959, China won its first world championship. Since then, table tennis was promoted politically in order to improve its image in the western world.

In anyway, it has been for the last 35 or 40 years that China has completely dominated this competition from head to toe with only a few surprises by the Swedish in the year 2000 and the Singaporean women's team (made of ex Chinese team cast offs) in 2010.