Unless you are some sort of Asian female muscle nut, it's unlikely you can name more than one or two Chinese female bodybuilders, and even connoisseurs would have trouble coming up with more than a handful of names. China may have a population of 1.3bn (and nearly half of them are women), but the very few Chinese female bodybuilders who have succeeded in making a name for themselves internationally have done so in the face of considerable economic and cultural obstacles.
When Chinese female muscle pioneer Zhang Ping saw a bodybuilding contest on TV in 1984 and made up her mind she was going to be a bodybuilder, her husband's horror was the least of her worries. As a former athlete, she well-understood the necessity of a strict training regime, but only by packing her son off to live with her parents was she able to spend two hours a day pumping iron after work. Food, specifically how to get enough protein on a very limited budget, was her biggest problem though, and she would go to the food market just before closing to make her money go further.
By 1990 though, she had found a sponsor in Hong Kong to pay her whey (ha!) and a couple of years after that she was able to open her own gym in Shanghai and start offering personal training. International success followed. She was Asian Amateur middleweight champion in 1992, and finished tenth as a lightweight - the highest ever placing for an Asian athlete at the time - at the World Amateur championships in 1993.
Nearly 30 years after she first started training, Zhang Ping is still training as hard as ever, and has no intention of stopping anytime soon. In her 50s now, she appears on Chinese TV and reveals the "secret" to having such youthful looks for her age. And I dare say this, as well as all the gold medals she has won in competition, makes her husband feel a lot more comfortable about his wife's lifestyle (and muscle) now!
In the 1990s, the Chinese female muscle torch was picked up and carried to more international success, firstly by Liang Yueyun, and, a few years later, by Cao Xinli. The former's career has proved to be the longer of the two (Liang Yueyun was still competing and winning as recently as 2012), but Cao Xinli is probably the better-known, much-photographed throughout her career, and, I don't mind admitting, a Swell favourite for a bit of webcam naughtiness back when I did that sort of thing.
Liang Yueyun
Both began competing internationally at a time when China while not exactly becoming more female muscle frriendly, had (officially at least) started to become less female muscle unfriendly. In Zhang Ping's time it had been illegal to sell female posing suits in the country - yes, there was actually a law about it! It hadn't been illegal to possess one (or more) but it meant that in order to obtain their posing suit, would-be competiitors were forced to make a trip to Hong Kong to buy one they could try on. But by the mid-1990s, the government clearly no longer deemed ripped female bodybuilders showing all that muscle off in a public place to be a threat to the fabric of society, and the restrictions on the sale of posing suits for women was lifted.
Cao Xinli
But since then... forgive me if I'm wrong, I don't claim to have any expertise on Asian female muscle, but it seems to me that the Asian women who have been and still are making an impact on a global level these days tend to come from Thailand, South Korea, perhaps Singapore. But they are most definitely not coming out of China.
This may be about to change. Real Female Bodybuilding reported last year that this October Zhengzhou International Conference Centre will play host to the first ever professional bodybuilding contest to be held in China, the IFBB Asian Pro Bodybuilding Championships. It is hoped that Chinese homegrown female bodybuilding talent will join the giants of the international sport, the article claims. And coincidentally, evidence that China is (officially) doing something to actively cultivate that homegrown talent popped up in the FMS inbox recently.
Six Female Uni Students Join National Bodybuilding Team read the headline from the Chinese English;language news source CRI English. Now, I have to admit that my excitement at reading that headline was somewhat dampened when I noticed exactly how much muscle these college "bodybuilders" were carrying - not a lot.
(left) Chen Qiuling "Bodybuilder"; (right) Sun Yufen "Bodybuilder"
However, when I started to think about it, I couldn't help wondering whether the national team might not train in some secluded area where you find an unusually high number of ex-East German coaches. The kind of place the Chinese swimming team trained before the Beijing Olympics, if you know what I mean. Maybe in a few months these college girls will have turned into the biggest Asian female muscle beasts ever...
Diao Mengyue "Bodybuilder"
Shanghai List had another explanation for their lack of beef, though. We assume they're competing more in the "fitness" rather than the "bodybuilding" category, it read, and it's probably right. Nevertheless, I feel that the fact that China has a female contingent in the national bodybuilding team at all must be a sign of progress in a country where female bodybuilding was so actively discouraged not so long ago.
And I leave you sort of where we started, with the remarkable Zhang Ping.
Enjoy!
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