Doping in China

China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), conduct a state sanctioned doping programme on athletes in the 1980s and 1990s. The majority of revelations of Chinese doping have focused on swimmers. The doping programme has been explained as a by-product of the "open door" policy which saw the rapid expansion within China of modern cultural and technological exchanges with foreign countries.

Bioethicist Maxwell J. Mehlman in his 2009 book The Price of Perfection, states that "In effect China has replaced East Germany as the target of Western condemnation of state-sponsored doping". Mehlman quotes an anthropologist as saying that "When China became a 'world sports power', American journalists found it all too easy to slip China into the slot of the 'Big Red Machine' formally occupied by Eastern bloc teams".

One early revelation of the issue of doping in China came in the aftermath of the women's weightlifting competition at the 1997 edition of the country's National Games. Two Americans, conservative pundit Steve Sailer and sports physiologist Stephen Seiler, noted that "tough drug testing is politically impossible" at the Games, and summarized the events there:

The 1997 Games in Shanghai were such a bacchanal of doping that all 24 women's weightlifting records were broken, but weightlifting's governing officials had the guts to refuse to ratify any of these absurd marks.

In 1992 the number of Chinese swimmers in the top 25 world rankings soared from a plateau of less than 30 to 98, with all but 4 of the 98 swimmers female. Their improvement rate was much better than could have been expected as a result of normal growth and development. China subsequently performed beyond expectations to win 12 gold medals at the 1994 World Aquatics Championships amid widespread suspicions of doping. Chinese swimmers won 12 of 16 gold medals at the 1994 championships and set five world records.

Between 1990 and 1998, 28 Chinese swimmers tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, almost half the world total of drug offenders in sport. Seven swimmers tested positive for steroids at the Asian Games in Hiroshima in late 1994, these positive tests badly affected the squad to the extent that it won only one swimming gold at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Following the revelations of doping among Chinese swimmers at the Hiroshima games IOC Medical Commission chairman Alexandre de Mérode discounted the possibility of officially sanctioned Chinese doping stating that the results were "accidents that could happen anywhere". Chinese leaders initially blamed racist sports officials in Japan for manufacturing test results. A report by a joint International Swimming Federation and Olympic Council of Asia delegation to Beijing in 1995 concluded that "there is no evidence that the Chinese are systematically doping athletes". The revelations led to Australian, American, Canadian and Japanese sports officials voting against Chinese participation at the 1995 Pan Pacific Swimming Championships. In 1995 the Chinese People's Daily newspaper published an anti-doping policy and proclaimed an official prohibition on performance-enhancing substances.

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