Early Life
Zhuang was born in 1942 and he joined the Chinese National Table Tennis team as a teenager. His coach was Fu Qifang. In 1961, at the 26th World Table Tennis Championship, he won his first men's singles championship, and at the next two World Table Tennis Championships, the 27th and 28th in 1963 and 1965 respectively, he again won the men's singles championship.
He also won numerous champion titles at various other regional, national and international table tennis events, and the number of his championship titles exceeds all those won by the other members of the Chinese national team combined. No single player has ever won so many championship titles.
In the fall of 1959, Zhuang Zedong met the pianist, Bao Huiqiao, in Vienna, Austria, at the 7th World Youth Peace and Friendship Festival. She was there, along with the pianist Yin Chengzong, to participate in a piano competition.
Shortly after Zhuang won his first world men's singles championship in 1961, Bao Huiqiao won the fifth place at the International George Enescu Piano Competition in Romania.
At the Spring Festival party given by Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing in 1962, Zhuang Zedong met Bao Huiqiao again and sent her a toy model car that he won as an award in a game at the party and they subsequently started dating each other.
On January 20, 1968, two years into the depth of the Cultural Revolution, they got married in the dormitory room of Bao Huiqiao at the National Music Conservatory in Beijing. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Zhuang had not been able to pursue his career as a table tennis player as usual, nor had Bao hers as a pianist. In late 1968, Bao Huiqiao gave birth to a son, and they named him Zhuang Biao.
Read more about this topic: Zhuang Zedong
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