Winner takes all. That seems true for many Chinese athletes who win gold medals or championships at the international level.

Li Na had already won more than $1.7 million as this year's French Open champion. So the 600,000 yuan ($92,830) she received from the government in her home province of Hubei for being a role model came as a bonus.

Credit goes to Li Na for managing herself like the other professional players. Her victory has seemingly blazed a new trail for success alongside the country's State-run sports system.

The State-run apparatus cultivates national pride among aspiring athletes to egg them on to achieve world glory. This State-run sports system has been so effective that it helped the country end the United States' dominance at the Olympics at the 2008 Beijing Games.

The shock even forced the US Olympic team to think about asking the federal government for financial help, according to the Financial Times. The US team gets no funds from Washington. Nevertheless now that the US is in a fiscal mess, it is unlikely that the federal government will help out the US Olympic team.

While the Chinese government allots by far the highest amount in the world to the sports sector, the hard truth is that only a small fraction of the recruits that underwent the rigorous training regime eventually succeeded in the international arena.

Ostensibly, the State-run sports system, which has helped China dominate games such as table tennis and badminton, will continue. In fact, the government is thinking about expanding the system to include games in which its athletes have failed to excel internationally.

On Sunday, State Councilor Liu Yandong urged Chinese sport officials to create a system that would promote healthy development and management of soccer in China. The reform and development of soccer in China is a long-term and complicated project.

Officials should study the advantages of both the State-run sports system and market-driven mechanism and learn from others' experiences, Liu said. Only then a suitable system can be developed to reinvent the beautiful game in China.

As a long-term player in the national team before becoming an independent professional player, Li's success shows the combination of the State-run sport system and more market-driven mechanism can pave the way for the rise of more Chinese sport superstars at international events, as well as help them to thrive in more sports.

Soccer is surely different from tennis, but its road to success in China may look quite like Li's.

(China Daily 07/09/2011 page5)