Identify and briefly describe the most popular sport in your country. Then explain why this sport has become the most popular sport in your country. Support your ideas with evidence as well as personal examples and/or experiences.

China has a population of 1.4 billion and it produces much more ping-pong players than any other country (Lubin, "Why China is so staggeringly good at table tennis”). China, reportedly, has 10 million professional ping-pong players, and about 300 million casual players (Lubin, "Why China is so staggeringly good at table tennis”). 

Ping-pong, interchangeably used as table tennis, is a sport that two or four players stand on the opposite sides of a ping pong table - 2.74 meters long and 1.525 meters wide. The player must make sure that they get the ball and hit it to the other side and try their best to make it challenge for the opposite side’s player.

Ping-pong is the most popular sport in China. Three things that contributed to its high popularity, which are political influences, equipment requirements, and the player’s physique demand.

Chinese government puts a lot of political influence on Ping-pong. China and U.S didn’t have any diplomacy relationships after the new China has established. After Zhuang Zedong, the champion Chinese ping pong player at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Japan, interacted with Glenn Cowan, an American layer, Chairman Mao invited American ping pong team to visit China. A year later, President Richard Nixon officially visited China. This is the so-called "Ping Pong Diplomacy" (Marston, "Once a tool for diplomacy, table tennis now viewed by China as so much more”). Later, given Chinese ping-pong teams always win international competitions, so the government always put a high expectation on the Chinese ping-pong team. Such political influence bear fruit. China has won a total of 28 out of 32 championships in summer Olympics since 1988, including all the four championships in 2016 (Lubin, "Why China is so staggeringly good at table tennis”).

The easy of setting up the ping-pong is also a point that makes ping-pong popular. Given China had low GDP in 1950s, the low cost of setting up ping pong as a sport, and its less popularity in western countries, Chairman Mao, the top Chinese communist leader, declared ping pong as the national sport, so the whole country has valued and practiced extremely ping pong ever since (Lubin, "Why China is so staggeringly good at table tennis”). In my own experiment, there are a lot of Chinese schools are providing ping-pong equipment, some parks are providing ping-pong equipment and my own neighborhood are having some ping-pong equipment. Which makes me feel like people has been encouraged to play ping-pong. Statistics shows that every 7 Chinese has 1 ping pong table (EmRatThich, "Top 5 reasons why China is so good at table tennis").

Chinese body size fix ping-pong perfectly. On average, Chinese people are smaller, less muscular, they are shorter, thinner. But they are much flexible, they can move fast. Comparing ping pong with other sports, such as American football, that require high physical strength, Liang Geliang, a former world champion and a Peking University Health Science Center professor, commented "[ping pong] was perfect for the Chinese physique. It is not important if you're strong. You have got to be smart, and you've got to have good nerves." (Li, "Table Tennis in China Part 1: King of the Table”). in my school, on average the girls are 1.6m in average, and the boys are 1.72m in average. They are slim, less muscular

All these reasons make Ping-pong become the most popular sport in China. Ping pong offers Chinese a supreme pride given Chinese players constantly win the championships in world ping pong competitions (Li, "Table Tennis in China Part 1: King of the Table").