Chinese women's volleyball is in a terrible decline

From top tournaments to youth tournaments, the performance of Chinese women's volleyball has declined to an alarming level.

China failed at the 2025 Women's Volleyball World Championship - Photo: XINHUA NEWS

At the recently concluded Asian Women's U16 Volleyball Championship in Jordan, China once again disappointed when they stopped in the semi-finals.

The name that defeated the mighty China was even more shocking, it was the Taiwanese team which has no tradition in volleyball.

This achievement is a step back for China compared to the last edition of the tournament, when they finished runners-up in 2023.

Not long before, the Chinese women's youth volleyball team also caused a heartbreaking disappointment when they were defeated at the 2025 Asian Youth Games, finishing in 8th place.

At this tournament, the Chinese women's volleyball team shockingly lost to Southeast Asian opponents such as Thailand and Indonesia in the group stage, then lost to Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia in the classification round.

However, this failure is relatively understandable when China brought to the tournament a team 2 years younger than the U18 team of other countries.

Why? Because Chinese volleyball is determined to reform after seeing clear signs of decline in recent times.

The national team's performance clearly shows that, as China has been steadily declining in the VNL (FIVB Nations League, held annually) and the world championship arena.

When VNL was born in 2018, China always occupied a place in the top 4 strongest teams in the first tournaments. By 2023, they were still comfortably in the second place, when stars like Zhu TIng, Yuan Xinyue, Li Ying Ying were at the peak of their performance.

But in the last 2 years, China has been eliminated from the top 4. And more importantly, they have fallen behind Japan - the 4th ranked team in VNL this season.

Stars like Li Ying Ying are in decline - Photo: CN

The World Cup has further confirmed China’s decline. In four consecutive tournaments since 2014, China’s performance has gradually declined, from runner-up (2014), to semi-finals (2018), quarter-finals (2022) and round of 16 (2025).

In this year's tournament, the Chinese women's volleyball team suffered a shocking loss to France in the round of 16 in Thailand, while Japan continued to thrive to enter the top 4.

And on the world rankings, China was pushed down to 6th place, officially being dethroned by Japan as the "big sister" of the continent.

It was those failures that made Chinese volleyball determined to reform from the current young generation. But consecutive failures at the Asian Youth Games and the Asian U16 Championship show that that determination is facing a huge challenge.

HUY DANG

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/bong-chuyen-nu-trung-quoc-sa-sut-tham-hai-20251110151255063.htm