Chen Jin, the 20-year-old Chinese new hope who became a surprise winner of the German Open in Mulheim last week, continued his destruction of the seeds to reach the quarter-finals of the All-England championships.

His latest success was a dramatic success against Boonsak Ponsana, the 12th seeded Thai player, in which Chen gained an eight-point lead and then lost it in an incident-strewn second game and still somehow resisted the surge against him to win 17-14,17-14.

This followed Chen's conquest in the opening day of Muhammad Hafiz Hashim, the eighth-seeded former All-England champion from Malaysia, and increased the possibility that three of the four men's semi-final slots will be taken by Chinese players.

However Chen's long sequence of matches may be telling on him. Twice in succession near the end he somehow failed to put the shuttle away into an open court, seeing Ponsana make a fantastic full length diving retrieve winner on the second of them.

The momentum appeared to be with the Thai at that stage. However Ponsana needed to have his fingers taped up at 13-14 and although he returned after a four-minute delay to save that match point bravely, it proved only a stay of execution.

The end came with more quirky drama, as Chen punched a clear which Ponsana thought was going out, only to change his mind at the last moment and launch a belated retrieve which was swatted away with a relieved and celebratory flourish by the tiring Chen.

He now plays Peter Gade, the former world number one and the 1999 All-England champion from Denmark. A 15-8, 15-5 win over Ng Wei, the tenth seeded China's Hong Kong player, means Gade has conceded only 31 points in three matches.

China's grip on both singles titles now seems to be tightening inexorably.

Earlier Chen Hong, the titleholder, and Lin Dan, the favourite, both won well, emulating their female counterparts who had already reached the last eight.

The two women did that with two overwhelming victories each. Titleholder Xie Xingfang won 11-1, 11-4 against New Zealand's Rebecca Bellingham and then 11-6, 11-0 against Kaori Mori of Japan.

Top seed Zhang Ning followed an 11-4, 11-2 success against Yip Pui Yin of China's Hong Kong with an impressive 11-4,11-3 win over Juliane Schenk of Germany, increasing the chances that the women's singles title will go to China for the ninth time in ten years.

The biggest obstacles to these two contesting another big final - they played last year's here and the world championship final in Anaheim in August together - may come from former Chinese squad members.

Also through to the last 16 are Pi Hongyang the third seed who now represents France, Wang Chen, the fourth seed who now plays for China's Hong Kong, and Xu Huaiwen, the fifth seed who is now a German international.

The first women's seed to go out was Tracey Hallam, the Taipei Open champion from England, who was the first player from her country to be seeded in this event for 15 years.

But the eighth-seeded Hallam, who lives only half an hour's drive from the arena, has had a succession of opening encounter defeats in her home event, and this time she was beaten 11-9, 13-10 by Cheng Shao-Chieh, the world 14 from Taipei.

(AFP via CRI January 20, 2006)