The Boxing Rebellion.(Chinese amateur boxer Zou Shiming)

On a cold night in November, Zou Shiming, the captain of China's national boxing team, arrived early for a banquet in his honor at a Chinese restaurant in a mall in Chicago, where the amateur world championships were being held. Zou is twenty-six, stands just under five feet five inches tall, and looks boyish enough to be a teen-ager, but wrinkles form beside his eyes when he smiles. The speck of a scar by his left eye is not from boxing but from a girl who once bullied him in school. He has sharp cheekbones, a thick brush of black hair, and a long, aquiline nose. Like most boxers, he alternates between two sizes: regular weight--in his case, a hundred and ten pounds--and fighting weight (a hundred and six pounds). Before each competition, he spends most of a month famished. He gets grumpy and irritable, and then apologizes. For distraction, he gnaws on watermelon slices and spits out the pulp. Or he pulls up pictures of lamb noodles and posts them on his blog.

His teammates were still outside the restaurant, window-shopping, but Zou took a seat at an empty table. He laid out a Chinese newspaper and scanned the headlines, with little interest. The bridge of his nose was puffy and blue from his last bout, a few hours earlier. He was still in his red-and-white team warmup suit with "China" embroidered in gold thread across the back. On his left breast he wore a small brass pin of Mao Zedong's head--a gift from his coach, Zhang Chuanliang, whom he calls Teacher Zhang. After eight days of competition, Zou's cheeks had hollowed, and his smile was tired. "I'm hungry," he said in Chinese.

Zou could feast now. He had won that day, gaining his second world championship and confirming his place as the first boxer in Chinese history to be considered a contender for an Olympic gold medal. A few years ago, it was hard to imagine that a Chinese boxer could win anything. The sport was banned for decades, because Mao's government considered it too violent and too Western. It wasn't allowed until 1986, after sports authorities made a calculation: boxing has eleven weight classes, thereby providing dozens of medal opportunities. That means a lot to a government that has elevated the hunt for Olympic medals to a state religion, a faith never more fervent than today, as China prepares to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, in Beijing. Chinese boxing officials have a name for their objective: the "zero-gold-medal breakthrough."

"Our target for the 2008 Olympics is explicit: one gold medal," Chang Jianping, the president of the Chinese Boxing Association, told me. When the Beijing News asked Teacher Zhang, who is the team's head boxing coach, what he thought of that prospect, he replied, "The entire national team has only one person really capable of capturing the gold: Zou Shiming."

Zou's first fight in Chicago fell during lunchtime, and the crowd was sparse. Only muffled thuds and the polyglot shouts of opposing cornermen broke the stillness of the arena, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on the city's Near West Side. Two rings had been erected side by side, so that simultaneous fights could speed the opening rounds.

The world outside had intruded already. The Cuban team, from which two fighters have defected in recent years, was boycotting the competition, saying that it suspected a conspiracy by the "most vile interests of the United States and some of its allies: the theft of athletes." Separately, two Ugandan fighters, including the team captain, had vanished from their hotel with their suitcases. One later called the coach to say, with apologies, that he was in Canada, but made no mention of returning home.

From the warmup area, Zou walked silently to the ring. The announcer stumbled over his name ("Sheeming Joe!"), to a polite flutter of applause. Zou slipped through the ropes. In his corner, in a hooded sweatshirt, stood Teacher Zhang, who looked so unprepossessing that he might have been a spectator who had stepped up for a closer look. Zhang coached martial arts until 1986, when he switched to boxing, and rose to the sport's upper ranks. At fifty-four, he is trim and good-looking, with a brush cut that, like many Chinese men his age, he dyes an inky black. He has little appetite for conversation, but if he's asked about fighting his eyes sparkle and he embarks on long, precise paragraphs. He has done more than anybody else to define China's boxing style, yet he is so averse to attention that he can sometimes be found napping in the locker room during medal ceremonies while his fighters are on the podium. Zhang's indifference to formality is unusual, to say the least, in China's sports bureaucracy. "The leaders don't like him," a coach who has known him for many years says. "He has never kissed the leaders' asses."