CHINESE sports authorities suggest Western suspicions at their methods are unfair, but the catalogue of statistics and incidents does little to silence the sceptics:
q DURING the 1990s, 27 Chinese swimmers have tested positive for banned drugs - more than the rest of the world combined.
q LAST year, Chinese female swimmers set two world records and recorded the best times in eight of the 13 individual events - biggest domination of the sport since the drug-discredited East German regime. Chen Yang and Wu Yan Yan set world records in the 400 and 200m individual medley respectively, despite not having been ranked in the world top 50 at the start.
q AT the Perth world championships this year, Yang Yang and her coach were suspended for four years, after Australian customs discovered vast quantities of human growth hormone in her baggage, allegedly for selling to Australian coaches. Four Chinese swimmers in Perth tested positive for the use of a diuretic used to mask and speed the flushing out of other banned substances. They were all subsequently reinstated. One, Wang Luna, has since won the 200 metres breast-stroke at the national championships.
q AT the 1994 world swimming championships in Rome, Chinese women won 12 of the 16 titles available. Afterwards, seven of their swimmers tested positive for dehydrotestosterone.
q TEN Chinese athletes (eight women) failed dope tests last year - more than any other nation.
q ON October 16 last year, Britain's Kelly Holmes topped the women's world 1500m rankings for the year. Two days later there were 17 Chinese performances ahead of her, by nine athletes. At the same meeting, three women broke the world record for 5000m, in heats and final.
q IN two days of September, 1993, at the National Games, the world 3000m record which had stood for nine years to a Russian woman subsequently banned as a cheat, was beaten 10 times by five athletes, in heats and final.
q IN that same meeting, Wang Junxia wiped 42 seconds from the world 10,000m record. She was the first woman under 30 minutes, clocking 29min 31.78sec - a time which would have ranked as the men's world record until 1949, when Emil Zatopek ran 29-28.2. No world athletics record has been achieved by any of their male athlete, and none was set outside China.
q DURING last year's National Games, the world record was broken in every single women's weight-lifting event.
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