JUST two weeks before the 48th World Table Tennis Championship (WTTC), which will run from April 30 to May 6, was to open in Shanghai, former world champion Wang Liqin announced that he was to be transferred from Shanghai Sheng Xue Rong Table Tennis Club to Zhejiang Hai Tian Club.

As a senior player who won the men's doubles championship in the 47th WTTC and the men's singles in the 46th WTTC, Wang has always been considered a representative figure of ping-pong in Shanghai and in China more widely. After his transfer, his former club, the only ping-pong club in Shanghai, admitted it was facing a critical situation in the League of China Table Tennis.

"This season, the major task for us is to struggle to survive and avoid relegation," said Wang Ge, the chief manager of the Shanghai Sheng Xue Rong Club.

Starting young

Once Shanghai was the most important base for table tennis in China - 16 world champions have been from Shanghai over the past 50 years. Among the only three WTTC women's grand prix championships that Chinese players have won, two were won by players from Shanghai - Lin Huiqing and Cao Yanhua.

Wang's experiences clearly illustrate the road to world success those players have taken. Almost 22 years ago, when he was just five years old, Wang found himself greatly attracted by this game. He began to attend the Zhabei Amateur School of Physical Education to undertake training.

But he had not yet set upon becoming a professional player. He recalls that being good at table tennis was not very useful when it came to winning the respect of classmates and friends. In those days, Wang and his classmates often placed textbooks in the middle of their desk to build temporary ping-pong tables during the class break, when they could enjoy 10 minutes of ping-pong.

Such childhood memories are not especially strange for people of Wang's age or older.

Zhang Guozhong is a 42-year-old businessman living in Shanghai. Every weekend, he drives his 10-year old son to the Hongkou Amateur School of Physical Education for soccer practise.

"When I was a boy, the most popular sport was definitely ping-pong. Everyday after school, my classmates and I rushed out of the classroom and ran to the stone tables behind our school. We placed some bricks - or sometimes our schoolbags - on top as a net and played ping-pong for hours," Zhang recalled.

He said that ping-pong bats were too expensive for him when he was a child, so he asked his father to make a pair out of pieces of wood."My classmates were a bit envious of my bats at that time," he added with smile.

Qian Ping is a ping-pong coach from the Hongkou Gymnasium. His routine tasks include instructing children and playing ping-pong with grow-ups.

"My skill has been tempered by all kinds of tables and bats - even using my hands as bats. We were enthusiastic about playing table tennis and thought it was the most interesting sport in the world. After I was selected by a training school, I felt incredibly proud to be a professional player. It suggested a certain heroism," Qian said.

New heroes

But today table tennis has become less attractive to children. Zhang's son is a good illustration of this trend. Zhang said that when his son was six or seven years old, he tried to play table tennis with him. He even bought a real ping-pong table. Though his child showed great interest at first, he later found an idol of his own.

"He was crazy about David Beckham by the time he began attending primary school. That guy became the constant topic among his classmates. He asked me to buy him the same type of soccer jersey Beckham wears. His room is full of Beckham's posters," said Zhang while waiting for his son at the soccer training field. "Eventually I had to sell the ping-pong table to a middle-aged couple and bought my boy a full set of soccer equipment - including the same jersey Beckham wears."

Qian also confirmed the declining enthusiasm of today's children for ping-pong. "It's obvious that compared to a few years ago, the number of children who attend table tennis courses has declined while the number attending other sports courses has risen. As for me, ever more adults come here and ask me to play ping-pong with them. When we play table tennis, we often dredge up nostalgic memories from our childhoods - the shabby tables and bats we used and the rules for playing ping-pong we followed when we were children. But for children today, these things sound a bit strange - they enjoy playing soccer or basketball more. Unlike us, they don't really understand the outstanding past achievements of Chinese ping-pong players. Maybe they know something about Wang Liqin or Zhang Yining (a woman table tennis world champion from Beijing) - but only if they have seen matches or advertisements with these players on TV."