China pledged to create a domestic hockey league already ahead of the Olympics, only the last two years or so there has been any movement to fill even a small part of the void and mostly within the Beijing Hockey Association. Of course any movement is better than no movement and I wish the new "professional" league project well, although I'm not a fan of relocating the only two teams with any actual traditions for it.
But that's beside the point. The Olympic lift in Japan and Korea was already wasted and I have no grand hopes for China either. We have had a special Asia and Oceania committee within the IIHF for quite a while now, yet no tangible results whatsoever. Australia and New Zealand already abandoned the group altogether. Kazakhstan applied for the top-level World Championship tournaments year after year but was denied for geopolitical reasons, so they came up with this nonsense instead. I get that it's fine as an Asian "Deutschland Cup", but there's need for so much more and giving it the grand title of a continental championship just makes mockery of that.
