Have you looked at how china failed miserably at building a football empire? Xi jinping put massive efforts into developing a generation of players good enough to compete. Obviously didn't work with them getting spanked by the likes of viet nam. So they gave up.
Dunno what it is. You saw how they improved massively for the olympics but football just didn't work at all. Now he's told the chinese businesses to withdraw from european football ownership or at least limit their spending.
You won't see it now. You'll see it a decade to two decades from now.
The essential problem is not that China doesn't have talented footballers - it has just as many as any other East Asian nation per capita. The problem is, at its heart, that societal preferences in China have historically steered kids away from football as a career or passion, so these kids rarely go pro.
There are other problems, of course - corruption, the poor regulation/oversight of Chinese sport writ large, the constantly shifting regulations that have regularly resulted in bankruptcies and clubs folding up and down the Chinese game. But the largest is a cultural one - kids in China are not brought up to regard football as a potentially respectable career option.
The government trying to set up 50,000 'special football schools' by 2025 is a top-down approach to forcing culture change, trying to get kids interested in the sport, and in sport more broadly, as a viable career choice.But until now, as a newly industrialized economy with a burgeoning middle class, the culture for kids in China has largely seen sports as secondary to academic achievement first and foremost as a means to prosperity. For middle-class and upper-class kids, this means parent spending is focused on kids' academic growth over sporting pursuits. For poor kids, sport is generally ignored as a vehicle for social mobility. And the result is that sport just struggles to be seen as a viable route to prosperity - at least as much as professional achievement.
You see the same thing in India - apart from cricket, sport writ large is not something ambitious middle-class parents prioritize for their kids, and poor kids have no route into the small professional sports setup in India. Societal respectability for sport as a career option/life pursuit is generally far below the societal worth of being a doctor, engineer, etc.
The good news for China (and India, further down the line), is that the history of developed East Asian economies with high HDIs (South Korea and Japan first and foremost) show that a football culture does emerge once a country stabilizes as upper-to-high income for a sufficient period. In general, as the transition to a developed service economy accelerates, various new career options start being seen as 'acceptable' or 'respectable', including sport - and once that happens, good footballers start to go pro and a culture develops, making it self-sustaining.
So, to bring it to an end, Spurs scouts shouldn't be looking at China because of its football scene now. But its football scene in 20 years will be generating Sons, Nakamuras, Kagawas and Kim Min-Jaes with regularity, because of the transition to developed status and service/consumption-oriented economy happening right now that mean young kids are growing to see football as a more viable career path.
And, likewise, Spurs scouts should be looking at India for what its sport scene will look like 30 to 40 years from now, imo.