Zheng Qinwen won the China Open in Beijing on Sunday, defeating Mirra Andreeva 7-5, 6-4 to claim the largest WTA Tour title of her career. The 2024 Olympic champion, who required a wild card entry after recovering from an elbow injury, celebrated with an on-court karaoke performance before 15,000 home fans. The victory returns her to the top 30 in the world rankings.
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Zheng Qinwen has taken up a media role once more. At the final whistle of each match — from the qualifying rounds of the U.S. Open through to the main draw in New York and now onto the Diamond Court in Beijing — she had taken to dropping onto her back, a habit built up over those months of competition.
Carrying a gold medal from the Paris Games into Sunday's final, she defeated Mirra Andreeva 7-5, 6-4 to claim the WTA Tour's top prize, then turned her attention to further celebrations. In front of an arena holding 15,000 spectators at the China Open final, with a broader television audience tuned in, she concluded the trophy ceremony with a karaoke performance — a tradition her supporters have come to associate with her title celebrations.
To mark the end of her win, Zheng performed 梦的光点 (Light of Dreams), a track drawn from the animated series 神兵小将 (Shenbing Kids). After defeating Marie Bouzková earlier in the tournament, she struck a pose drawn from a character in the show she had introduced to her team — the same show whose song had prompted the gesture — and later explained the connection at a post-match news conference.
Zheng had previously marked her 2023 Zhengzhou Open title by singing on court, describing the moment afterwards as an extraordinary feeling. At the trophy ceremony on Sunday, Zheng expressed that lifting the title in Beijing, before the crowd that calls the city home, had long been among her personal aspirations.
With Zheng having turned 24 on Thursday, her path into the draw ran through a wild card, the result of an elbow injury that had kept her off the tour long enough for her ranking to slip past the top 150 before Wimbledon arrived in July. At a post-match news conference during the French Open in May, she broke down in tears after a one-sided loss to Maja Chwalińska, who went on to reach the tournament final.
Having worked through the U.S. Open qualifying process, Zheng pieced together a run that carried her into the quarterfinals across late August and early September in New York. Winning a title at that level would push her back into the top 30 of the rankings, moving her closer to the upper tier of the sport — a position she appeared to be building toward after taking Olympic gold and reaching the Australian Open final in 2024.
Zheng's first delivery found the service box on only 38 of every 100 attempts throughout the match against Andreeva on Sunday. Her second serve proved a consistent platform from which she generated points, and the openings that Andreeva — whose delivery was largely reliable throughout — did concede were converted with regularity.
Awareness of Andreeva's most effective weapon came to Zheng in time to reshape her approach as the match unfolded. By directing early forehand drives down the line into Zheng's backhand, Andreeva steered the rally toward diagonal groundstroke exchanges from that side of the court — the zone where her own backhand posed the greatest threat.
Throughout much of the opening set, Zheng tended to play into Andreeva's forehand rather than challenge it, though she gradually shifted her approach as the match progressed, targeting that wing with greater intent and drawing unforced errors that left the opposite side of the court exposed.
Opportunities to win the match remained within Andreeva's reach. Trailing 5-4 in the opening set and facing three set points on her own serve, Zheng turned the contest around with eight consecutive points, taking Andreeva's next service game without conceding a point and then holding to love herself to close out the set 7-5. A clean ace brought the set to a close in her favour.
Four of Zheng's victories on the path to the title required three sets each, a demanding stretch that had shaped her preparations throughout the summer months toward both physical and mental endurance. With the U.S. Open approaching, she stepped away from the Cincinnati Open to focus on a Florida training block, later noting that the conditions there had been extremely demanding.
At a news conference during the U.S. Open, Zheng described leaving every training session drenched in sweat from head to toe, adding that the sessions she had put in beforehand were not something she cared to dwell on. At the U.S. Open, Zheng twice clawed back from 5-0 deficits in a set — defeating Madison Keys and then Iga Świątek — before losing to Elena Rybakina, who went on to claim the title, with Zheng reflecting afterward that the experience had unfolded across many distinct chapters.
Speaking at a news conference after her quarterfinal victory over Elina Svitolina, she noted that the pattern had persisted throughout the tournament, adding that the low points this time had lasted longer than she had anticipated.
Down 0-30 on her own serve with the title within reach, Zheng had navigated a lengthy game to break Andreeva's delivery late in the second set before arriving at that juncture. Trailing in the match, she steadied herself by targeting the service box with assertive second deliveries to construct a match point opportunity, then sealed it with an unreturned serve before dropping onto her back on the court. The crowd responded as that portion of the proceedings got underway.