The UIM F1H2O World Championship visits China twice this autumn. The Grand Prix of China runs on September 28-30, 2026 at a venue still to be announced, followed by the Grand Prix of China – Shanghai at Baoshan on October 3-4, with the China CTIC Team racing at home in both.
That is the part of Chinese powerboat racing the world gets to see. Beneath it sits a domestic system that is almost invisible outside the country, run from the centre, funded by city governments, and busier in 2026 than it has ever been.
A Sport Run From the Centre
Chinese powerboat racing answers to the National Sports Administration’s Water Sports Management Centre and the Chinese Motorboat Sports Association, which organise the national calendar, sanction the classes and license the riders. China staged its first motorboat sport demonstrations in 1956 and joined the UIM in 1981.
A note on language helps here. The Chinese term motuoting covers powered race craft in general, and most domestic competition takes place on personal watercraft: sit-down runabouts and stand-up skis divided into production, limited and open classes. In UIM terms, the bulk of China’s domestic racing is aquabike.
The League That Started It
The China Powerboat League, known as CPL, was the country’s first league-format water sport when it launched, promoted by Beijing Today Impact, a company set up in 2011 specifically to run it. Its spiritual home is Pengshui in Chongqing, where the Wujiang river runs through a gorge beneath the county town and the racing shares its weekend with a Miao minority festival on the banks.
The league’s 13th edition ran at Pengshui on May 15-18, 2024, combining sit-down and stand-up PWC racing with flyboard freestyle and the Chinese Formula circuit class. League regulations standardised that formula class around identical hulls from Hangzhou builder Kanghua powered by unmodified Mercury 60 EFI race engines, the same engine formula that powers UIM F4.
The 2023 edition, the 12th, drew 24 teams and more than 100 competitors across seven events. Anhui’s Zhang Dianchun won the Formula class after defending champion Wu Bingchen of Shenzhen Tianrong retired from the final round with mechanical trouble, and Beijing’s Wang Zheng took the women’s RL3 title.
Zhang has competed in every edition of the Pengshui Grand Prix since the league arrived there in 2011, and has won the Formula title multiple times, including in 2023. He treats the Wujiang as familiar water.
Zhang Dianchun, speaking after his 2023 win:
I have won championships here, as well as runner-up and third place. This body of water is very familiar to me.
Entries mix provincial squads from Shanghai, Anhui, Jiangxi, Shandong, Hubei and Zhejiang with club teams such as Liuzhou Guokong and Hubei Aerospace Sanjiang.
A National Elite Circuit Arrives
A second national property arrived in 2025. The China Motorboat Open was introduced through Qingdao’s international sailing week and ran four stops in its first season: Linyi in June, Wanning on Hainan island in August, Qingdao’s Fushan Bay in September and Hanfeng Lake at Kaizhou, Chongqing, in October.
Around 20 teams and close to 100 riders contest each round across six classes, with the Hainan team’s Chen Shan taking the headline RL1 win at Qingdao. Kaizhou added something new to the format: a 40-minute RL1 endurance race, testing machine reliability and rider fitness alongside the traditional circuit sprints.
2026: The Grassroots Experiment
This year the Water Sports Management Centre added a third tier aimed squarely at the grassroots. The China Motorboat Club Cup is a new series for 2026 with a stated mission of facing the public and finding new stars, mixing invited elite classes with production classes, women’s events and taster races open to beginners under instructor supervision.
China Motorboat Club Cup 2026 stops: Changzhou West Taihu (concluded May 10) | Wuxi, Taihu (concluded June 14) | Yinchuan, Yuehai Bay (June 19-22, with the National Youth U-Series) | Qingdao (scheduled)
The Wuxi round was the city’s first national-level motorboat event. Thirty-two teams and more than 100 riders from Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Anhui and Hong Kong contested eight events on Taihu, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, based at the Taihu Shanshui Yacht Club in Binhu district.
One female competitor from Zhejiang, speaking to Shanghai news outlet The Paper during the Wuxi round (translated from Chinese):
Racing on Taihu is completely different from the sea. The water is calmer and the scenery is beautiful. Motorboat racing used to be dominated by men, but the Wuxi round has a dedicated women’s category, so more and more female riders have a professional stage to compete on.
The youth pathway sits underneath. Yinchuan ran its Club Cup round alongside the National Youth Motorboat U-Series on June 19-22, where more than 100 young riders raced stand-up and sit-down obstacle courses, electric kart boats and Formula Future classes on Yuehai Bay.
Why Cities Want These Races
None of this is driven by ticket sales. Chinese cities bid for national water sports events as tourism policy, and the numbers explain why. Binhu district recorded more than 36 million tourist visits in 2025 with tourism spending above 40 billion yuan, and hotels near the Wuxi course sold out a week before the racing, according to district officials quoted by The Paper.
Wuxi plans more than 50 branded sports events across 2026 and expects them to draw over two million spectators and visitors. Local officials also point to Taihu’s water quality, which reached its best levels since 2007 in the Wuxi area last year, as the foundation that makes lake racing possible at all.
Where It Connects to the World
The bridge back to the world championship runs through Tianrong Sports, the Shenzhen company that holds exclusive rights to promote F1H2O in China and has staged 22 Chinese Grands Prix since 2006, according to the Shanghai municipal government. Tianrong founded the China CTIC Team with the Water Sports Management Centre in 2006, and the team won three consecutive Teams World Championships from 2014 to 2016.
The domestic industry is moving in parallel with the racing. Chinese outboard builders Parsun and Hidea are pushing into higher horsepower brackets, while Hangzhou’s Kanghua supplies the league’s spec formula hulls.
When the UIM-ABP Aquabike Circuit World Championship opens its season in Shanghai on October 1-2, delayed from its original Middle East opener, the classes on the water will look familiar to anyone who has watched a Club Cup round on Taihu. China’s aquabike-led domestic scene will have a home world stage to measure itself against, two days before the F1H2O fleet races at Baoshan.
Follow the Road to Shanghai
Powerboat News covers the UIM F1H2O World Championship all season, including both Chinese Grands Prix this autumn.
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John Moore is the editor of Powerboat News, an independent investigative journalism platform recognised by Google News and documented on Grokipedia for comprehensive powerboat racing coverage.
His involvement in powerboat racing began in 1981 when he competed in his first offshore powerboat race. After a career as a Financial Futures broker in the City of London, specialising in UK interest rate markets, he became actively involved in event organisation and powerboat racing journalism.
He served as Event Director for the Cowes–Torquay–Cowes races between 2010 and 2013. In 2016, he launched Powerboat Racing World, a digital platform providing global powerboat racing news and insights. The following year, he co-founded UKOPRA, helping to rejuvenate offshore racing in the United Kingdom. He sold Powerboat Racing World in late 2021 and remained actively involved with UKOPRA until 2025.
In September 2025, he established Powerboat News, returning to independent journalism with a focus on neutral and comprehensive coverage of the sport.
