I'm sorry but what you are saying has nothing to do with the national team: in the past foreign players chose to play in the Chinese Super League because they were offering a ton of money, ok, we know, and what difference did it make for Chinese football? None. Chinese players were bad back then, they were bad when foreigners were playing, and they are still bad after the foreigners left. Focusing only on bringing in foreigners is totally useless if you try to improve your local players. Foreigners won't play for your national team (with a few exceptions, like Elkeson / Ai Kesen). Japan never paid a ton of money for foreign players and yet we can clearly see that their model works, China's doesn't.
Chinese soccer needs significant changes into their system if they want improvement in soccer which is not easy even possible their big game with Super League almost fail which is big setback for them but still they are capable of having good structure and improvement.
At this point I'm sure that China (and its government) don't care too much about football: maybe there has been a moment when they thought that investing in football could somehow be a good marketing move but now, looking at how things are going, it looks like they completely changed their minds and stopped any kind of investment. I have no idea why they completely renounced.
Japan and Korea done good work which is paying good results, and they are consistent at Asian level with always having spots into FIFA World Cup but sadly not other country is capable of having same level consistency and performance in this region. Currently, Saudi Arab doing with their money which is also possible for China, but they needed to work out on their grass-root level which is always helpful for countries having academies and bringing youths into players pool always bring positive results, but miserably China fails in this for long time.
Saudi Arabia for the moment is just spending money on foreign players, that is "easy" to do. What is difficult is to actually grow local players. Saudi Arabia have been bringing in a lot of foreign players for, how long, at least 5 years now? And how many Saudi players are there playing in Europe? Zero. They still have a lot of work to do, a lot, and they need a lot of patience.