From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

For during recent years its swimmers and coaches have been caught cheating so many times it is difficult to keep count – and it has modelled its draconian training system on precisely that which produced Schneider and other turbo-charged East Germans before the Iron Curtain fell.

It began in the Eighties when, determined to end the nation’s perennial humiliation at major athletics and swimming championships, China’s Communist regime decreed that a generation of future champions must be harvested and honed.

To that end, school teachers were ordered to scrutinise their pupils for signs of natural sporting ability and report any child with obvious potential to regional coaches who would install them in one of 3,000 new state training camps.

According to her mother, Qing Dingyi, as quoted by the Chinese state media, little Ye ‘expressed a wish to become a swimmer at the tender age of seven’.

In truth, she was picked out because she had an unusually masculine physique with extremely large hands and long limbs: attributes at first thought best suited to a career in track and field.

After being whisked away from her modest two-bedroom apartment, in Hangzhou, a city of 6.2 million, and installed into the Chen Jingluin sports school, however, it was decided she would be best suited to swimming, and by 11 she had won her first major junior championship.

Her mother insists she and her husband, a manual worker, had always impressed on her that ‘results are not important, but you should always enjoy the taking part’. One doubts she dares voice this opinion in the presence of her daughter’s coaches.

In swimming, as in most other Olympic sports, they enforce a regime so relentlessly harsh that it has been compared, by those few Western observers who have managed to penetrate the obsessive secrecy with which it is guarded, to that in some 19th-century prisons.

Indeed, after being shown how China’s child gymnasts are trained some years ago, in his capacity as an Olympic observer, Britain’s Olympic gold-winning oarsman Sir Matthew Pinsent – a man who knows a thing or two about pushing the human body to its limits – pronounced it a ‘pretty disturbing experience’.

Children who our own sports authorities would deem far too young even to countenance focusing seriously on one sport, let alone be taken away from their parents and billeted in these boot-camps, had been driven so hard that they wept, and one claimed to have been beaten by his coach.

The International Olympic Committee promised then to investigate his claims but seven years on there is no evidence that anything has remotely changed.

Only last January harrowing photographs were posted on the internet showing Chinese children crying in pain as they were put to work.

In case they had forgotten why they were there, a large sign on the wall reminded them. ‘GOLD’ it said simply.

What a tragedy. This is why I boycott the Olympics. To me there is nothing more important than having everything child welcomed into the world by his or her biological parents, and then having a stable loving environment to grow up in. I reject both the selfishness of adults and the fascist ideologies of socialist states. There is nothing more important to children than their parents. Children are more important than anti-family ideologies like feminism and socialism.

I recommend clicking through and reading the full article, and look at the pictures, too. This is what happens when the state takes precedence over individuals and families. We need to make sure that secularism and socialism do not dominate here, like they do in China.