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From humiliating punishments to invasive DNA testing, China’s prowess on the Olympic stage has come at a hefty price to thousands of children.

Communist Party-backed sports officials ruthlessly select and train competitors from an early age – with children as young as four being enlisted to train for glory at the Olympics.

With a colossal population of 1.4 billion, China has a sprawling state-backed operation that puts young athletes through brutal training regiments to prepare them for the world stage.

The country approaches sport with a level of precision, planning, and ruthlessness usually reserved for the battlefield.

Although China’s demanding state sports system has attracted criticism, it has also made it one of the most successful Olympic nations since it returned to the games in 1980.

The system is rooted in the Soviet model, which saw sport as a way of attracting prestige for the Communist system.

The state sends out scouts to hunt for tens of thousands of children for full-time training at more than 2,000 government-run sports schools.

Tests for selection see kids being given brutal challenges such as press-ups, endurance running and bench presses that prioritize overall strength over specific skills. 

And the elite pupils are shipped off to China’s National Training Center – a sprawl of buildings in a Beijing suburb patrolled by armed guards.

Once enlisted in the state-backed training camps, the youngsters are expected to sacrifice everything and train for glory under the Chinese flag.

It has also been reported for the first time at the Winter Olympics, China will be using DNA testing to select athletes for their physical attributes.

World championship figure skater Jessica Shuran Yu, who was born, raised and trained in China, claimed she suffered years of horrific abuse inside the brutal Chinese regime.

She said she was often smacked with a plastic skate guard when she made mistakes – and she was once kicked so hard with the toe-pick of a skate that it left a permanent scar on her shin.

Yu said a “culture of physical discipline” was common in the country – and athletes were often branded “lazy”, “stupid”, “retarded”, “useless” and “fat”.

She told The Guardian: “The abuse started from the age of 11 when I started being told to reach out a hand whenever I made mistakes.”

“On especially bad days, I would get hit more than 10 times in a row until my skin was raw.”

“When I was 14 and going through puberty, I started to struggle with my jumps because I was gaining weight. I was called over and kicked on the bone of my shin with a toe-pick of a blade and made to try again. I wasn’t allowed to limp or cry.”

“Most of the time such abuse happened in front of other skaters in the rink. I didn’t tell any of my friends, adults at school or my federation because I was incredibly humiliated. I was made to feel so small. It was dehumanizing.”

Yu said young Chinese athletes were abused when she coached at a prominent training center in Beijing.

She said: “I saw one junior skater get hit and dragged off the ice, while another was pressured into competing on two torn ligaments, which left them needing surgery afterwards.”

“It really hurts me to know that this abuse is still happening. Many athletes and coaches believe that such behavior is necessary and normal in China.”

“It is also hard for Chinese athletes to speak out. They could lose their spot and their careers could end. But as a Singaporean athlete who trained in China, I feel I am in a unique position.”

Johannah Doecke, a diving coach at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in the US, said female Chinese athletes are “literally beaten into submission”.

She told Reuters: “You wonder why the Chinese women are so successful? Most of the men are coaches. The women are literally beaten into submission.”

“If you said no to anything, you would be chastised, slapped around. It’s a brutal system.”

Doecke once trained Chinese diver Chen Ni – and she said the athlete was terrified of making a mistake. 

She said: “If she made a mistake, she would instantly kowtow and apologize.”

“As I worked with Chen, I would hear from time to time, ‘if you want a good performance out of her, you’ll have to beat her’.”

And in another savage move, athletes aiming to compete in the 2022 Winter Olympics were forced to undergo genetic testing as part of the official selection process to make sure there was no “ticking time bomb” in their genes.

China’s Ministry of Science and Technology said “complete genome sequencing” would be carried out on the athletes to test “for speed, endurance and explosive force”.

The genetic testing has been ongoing for the last two years to ensure China has selected only the best athletes for the global competition, the South China Morning Post reports.

An anonymous government researcher said: “Some kids have almost perfect physical examination reports, but there is a ticking bomb in their genes.”

“If it goes off it can take away money, years of effort – and even life.”

Many Chinese parents are lured into sending their kids to the brutal sports schools by government subsidies and promising Olympic careers for their children.

It doesn’t matter if the sports have mass appeal or if the youngsters have an interest – if they are deemed worthy it is their duty to perform for the sake of the nation.

Disturbing pictures show children as young as four being trained at a Chinese gymnastics school.

In one heartbreaking picture, a girl can be seen sobbing as she dangles from bars while a coach stands in front of her wielding a stick.

Another image shows a line of boys, most of them in tears, holding on to a bar at a gymnastics training center.

At the Li Xiaoshuang Gymnastics School there is little room for error.

They bow to their coaches in apology if they are not up to scratch, and a bad performance is punished with extra weight training at the end of a long day.

At night, they sleep in bunk beds – two sharing the top mattresses, two in the lower berths, in dormitories.

Children are selected by methods such as those who can stack bullets on their hands chosen for archery, and girls with long arms sent to weightlifting.

Gymnastic stars are known for starting at an incredibly early age but other sports, such as weightlifting, also put kids through brutal regimes.

And their young bodies have often been damaged by such intensive training at such a tender age.

Layne Vandenberg, an expert in Chinese sport from King’s College London, told The Sun Online: “Sports training and culture grew as a tactic for strengthening the military and embracing a ‘warlike spirit’ to combat the perception that China was the ‘sick man of Asia’.”

“In China, training a physical body and competing on a global stage like the Olympic Games is equivalent to defending the nation.”

“This concept manifests in athletic training that may reflect military-style training and culture, which is characterized as more demanding and, at times, brutal.”

The PhD candidate in the King’s College London-University of Hong Kong Joint PhD Programme added: “China hopes to project physical strength by producing high-achieving athletes.

“China has publicly committed to reaching goals of athletic prowess and following through on these commitments, which supports the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.”

“Maintaining its reputation as not only a country of athletic achievement but also a notable and worthy host of mega sporting events clearly continues to be an ongoing goal as we look forward to the upcoming 2022 Beijing Olympics.”

This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced here with permission.