Efforts are being made to establish an East-Asian women's basketball league, including the five countries of Korea, China, Japan, North Korea, and Taiwan. Yuanwei Lee, the vice president of the Chinese Basketball Association, who is visiting Shanghai for the drafting of players who will play in the Korean Women's Professional Basketball League, emphasized the need to form an East Asian league, upon meeting with officials of the Korean Basketball League (KBL) and with the reporters.


Lee forecast that the five countries should widen the scope of basketball exchanges with each other so that Asian basketball could reach the standard of other countries in the world. He said that Korea, China, and Japan agree on the need for such a league and that it is only a matter of time before actions are taken to form one.


Cho Seung-yeon, the managing director of the Women's Korean Basketball League (WKBL) explained that officials of the five countries will be invited to Korea prior to the initiation of championships on June 9, to discuss the establishment of the joint venture while watching summer league games in Korea.


Lee pointed out that Korea, China, and Japan were once the world's second best basketball countries, when all three countries' women's teams participated in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games but in the 1998 World Women's Championships Japan fell to 9th, China 12th, and Korea 13th, to result in only the Chinese men's team and the Korean women's team earning a ticket to the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.


The Chinese vice president said that the Chinese women's team is currently weaker than Korea's because it's going through a change of players but by the 2002 Nanjing World Basketball Championships, the Chinese team will recover its position of being the strongest team in Asia, and approach the world's top three countries by the 2004 Olympic Games.


(From Shanghai, Kim Wang-keun, wkkim@chosun.com)