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Tennis is a rapidly growing sport that has received much private and public support in China, and has today become firmly entrenched in the Chinese as one of the most popular. Tennis is now the third-most popular sport on television in China, behind Association football and basketball. The national governing body is the China Tennis Association.
China has 30,000 tennis courts and an estimated 14 million people in China regularly play tennis, up from 1 million when the sport returned to the Olympics in 1988, according to the WTA Tour. The Chinese government is aiming to increase that by 15 percent every year. The nation's tennis market has reached $4 billion annually, according to Tom Cannon, a professor and sports finance expert at the University of Liverpool Management School in England.
The women's tour in 2014 upgraded the China Open in Beijing to become the only combined event with the men's tour in Asia. Played at the Beijing Olympic Tennis Center with combined prize money of $6.6 million and a main stadium that holds 10,000 spectators, the China Open is now one of the WTA's top four tournaments. The ATP's other flagship tournament in Asia is the $3.24 million Shanghai Masters.