Coco Gauff only dropped one game as she kickstarted her Wuhan Open campaign with a rapid straight-sets victory over Moyuka Uchijima on Wednesday.

Four days after surrendering her China Open crown with a semi-final defeat to Amanda Anisimova, the Roland-Garros champion was a 6-1 6-0 victor in a mere 51 minutes.

Uchijima only managed to win more than a single point in one game in the first set, with Gauff imperious both on serve and with her defensive work, though she just missed out on a bagel.

However, Gauff did manage a clean sweep of the second set, which started with a four-deuce game but was more straightforward from that moment on.

Gauff will face either Shuai Zhang or Sorana Cirstea for a quarter-final place at the tournament, where she is seeded third.

She will be joined in the last 16 by Jessica Pegula, though she was made to work much harder to win a near-three-hour epic against fellow American Hailey Baptiste.

Pegula triumphed 6-4 4-6 7-6 (8-6) in two hours and 57 minutes, finally converting her seventh match point – and her second in a deciding tie-break. 

Pegula will face Ekaterina Alexandrova next, and the sixth seed has now won 13 matches in three sets on the WTA Tour this year, more than every player other than Madison Keys (15).

Gauff gets it done @CocoGauff defeats Uchijima in straight sets to reach the Round of 16 in Wuhan.#WuhanOpen pic.twitter.com/09QipMexNq

— wta (@WTA) October 8, 2025

Data Debrief: Gauff's favourite stage

Gauff's victory maintained her excellent record on Chinese soil, where she has now won 18 main-draw matches at WTA Tour-level events in the last three years.

That is the most of any player on the tour, narrowly edging out Qinwen Zheng's 17 victories in China during that span.