“Queen-wen” indeed: Zheng Qinwen’s most powerful tennis Is a warning blast for 2027

There were stretches of Zheng Qinwen’s semifinal against Elise Mertens in Beijing today when I wondered what, exactly, an opponent was supposed to do. Get the racket back earlier? Stand farther behind the baseline? Guess? Good luck with any of that.

During her 7-5, 6-2 win, Zheng hit some of the most overwhelming tennis I’ve watched on the WTA Tour this year. I know how much ground that statement covers. I’ve watched Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina. I’ve seen plenty of matches in which a very good player was made to look decidedly ordinary. But at several junctures today, the combination of pace, flatness and conviction coming off Zheng’s racket was something else altogether.

Queen-wen, indeed. Because “wen” she plays like that, the nickname feels less like a clever bit of marketing and more like a reasonable description of who’s running the court.

I’m talking about her highest level within the match. Every player has stretches when the timing slips or a decision goes wrong. What caught my attention was how little room Mertens had to work with when Zheng found hers. A ball would leave the racket, arrive somewhere deeply inconvenient and force a response that already looked like the beginning of the end of the point. Sometimes, watching on television, I could barely follow the shot before it was past her.

There’s power, and then there’s the feeling that someone has taken away your time to play tennis. Zheng was doing the latter.

Her movement made the whole thing even more impressive. At her best today, she seemed to arrive where she needed to be without wasting a step. She was balanced, ready and able to put her body behind the ball. The violence of the shot came out of preparation that looked almost unremarkable. Then, suddenly, Mertens was scrambling.

Watching all of this in Beijing also got me thinking about something we probably don’t give enough consideration: how little of Zheng’s tennis year takes place at home.

She trains in Europe and has built an unmistakably international career. To my eye, she’s as comfortable moving through the wider tennis world as any Chinese player, woman or man. That matters in a sport that asks its athletes to spend much of their lives somewhere else, adjusting to different conditions, different languages and another hotel room.

But being comfortable abroad isn’t quite the same as walking onto a court in China’s capital and hearing that crowd.

For most of the season, Zheng brings her own energy to the match. In Beijing, there’s an entire stadium willing to contribute. You could feel the connection today, even through a television screen. Every thunderous winner seemed to come back to her as noise, and there were moments when she looked completely at ease being the person everyone had come to see.

That isn’t automatic. A home crowd can tighten a player’s arm as easily as it can lift her spirits. Expectations follow you onto the court, too. Everybody wants a win; everybody has an opinion about what you should be doing. Yet today, Zheng appeared to draw strength from the occasion.

One of my favorite moments had very little to do with a winner. Late in the first set, with the Beijing crowd getting too vocal during one of Mertens’s service games, Zheng took the time to shush them. She wanted their support, clearly. She also wanted them to let her opponent serve.

It was a small gesture, but an assured one. Here was a player feeding off the crowd while still being willing to tell it to settle down. There’s something appealing about that kind of command, especially when the tennis itself is already making quite enough noise. Which brings me to 2027.

A healthy Zheng Qinwen, able to train properly and compete consistently, looks to me like a player headed back toward the territory of her career-high No. 4 ranking. I don’t mean she’ll get there simply because she produced some spectacular shots in October. A ranking is built over months, including the afternoons when nothing feels particularly spectacular and you still have to find a way through.

But the tennis required is there. We’ve seen it before, and today offered another very persuasive look.

Yes, the top of the women’s game is crowded. There are outstanding players who would have every reason to object to what I’m about to say. Still, when Zheng is playing her very best tennis, I see only three women as the most convincing obstacles: Rybakina, Sabalenka and Mirra Andreeva, the player she faces in tomorrow’s Beijing final.

That’s my judgment about the matchup at her peak, rather than a prediction that nobody else can beat her. Of course they can. Sustaining this level is the challenge, and opponents get a vote. But Rybakina and Sabalenka can bring the kind of serving and first-strike power that prevents Zheng from taking control in the first place. Andreeva presents a different problem, with her reading of the game, her movement and her ability to make an opponent hit one more ball from a less comfortable position.

Tomorrow should give us a fascinating look at that last test. How much time can Zheng take away? How much can Andreeva find for herself? Those are questions I’m very happy to spend a final watching.

For now, though, I keep coming back to the sheer pleasure of seeing Zheng hit a tennis ball this well. We spend so much time discussing rankings, draws and what a result means that we can hurry past the reason we switched on the match. Today, there were shots worth watching again simply because they were magnificent.

She only gets a small portion of the season in front of a home crowd. If she can take this freedom, this efficient movement and this extraordinary ball-striking with her into a healthy 2027, the rest of the tour will have plenty to think about. And considerably less time to think about it.