I'm sorry but I'm totally lost: in the last 2 posts I read that China have made significant improvements and Japan, despite their efforts, never achieved anything? China never achieved anything in football; Japan since they hosted the World Cup in 2002 kept improving and improving, now many teams in Europe have Japanese players when 20 years ago almost everyone was playing in Japan with a few exceptions like Nakata, Ono, and Inamoto. Japan also won the Asian Cup 4 times and constantly qualified for the World Cup so the progress they mad in the last 20+ years is quite notable. So, again, I don't understand what you guys are saying.
LOL.. comparing China with Japan. The latter has been perhaps the strongest football team from AFC for the last few decades. IMO, they are better than South Korea, Iran, Australia and Saudi Arabia. But the only drawback is now the demographics. Unlike the case with Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan, Japan doesn't have a very young population. And this means that the player pool is shrinking. That said, despite having such a huge population, what has China achieved so far?