Beijing: The China national badminton team will depart for Japan on August 18 to participate in the 2022 World Badminton Championships, which will be held in Tokyo from August 21 to August 28.
Although China has no men’s doubles pairs that qualified for this year’s World’s meet, it would send the strongest lineup to compete at 4 other individual events.
In men’s singles, China is sending World No. 25 Shi Yuqi, World No. 24 Lu Guangzu, and World No. 23 Zhao Junpeng. Although their rankings are relatively low compared to other top players in the world, we all know that no one should underestimate players from China as every one of them is capable of creating surprises.
Shi Yuqi will open against Ade Resky Dwicahyo of Azerbaijani and if he could make it to the semi-finals, he is very likely to take on World No. 1 Viktor Axelsen from Denmark. No one knows how good Shi is right now as he had been absent from international competition for almost one year.
In women’s singles, Chen Yufei is aiming to join these women’s singles legends: Susi Susanti of Indonesia, Zhang Ning of China, and Carolina Marin of Spain in becoming the fourth women’s singles player to ever win both the Olympics gold and World Championships title. She could face Nozomi Okuhara or Tai Tzu Ying in the semi-finals. If she advances to the final, she’ll very likely meet defending champion – Akane Yamaguchi of Japan for the title.
As for Chen Qingchen/Jia Yifan who came to defend the women’s doubles title, they have been pretty stable and were the best Chinese women’s pair in the first half of the year and are still in excellent form. Therefore, they are one of the heavy favorites to win the women’s world title this year.
Meanwhile, Zheng Siwei/Huang Yaqiong who just came off from six consecutive international titles, and if they could maintain their sizzling hot momentum, they should be able to win their third world title after winning them in 2018 Nanjing and 2019 Basel editions.
On paper, the China badminton team is the most well-balanced team in the World Championships, it’s going to be interesting to see how the Chinese players perform when it comes to the real competition.
