Football team

Chinese Taipei

Club · Taiwan · Asian Games

«Blue Whales»

41 Matches

16 wins

25 losses

3181–3424 Points

−243 Difference

77.6 Average per match

Form L L W L W L

Taiwan's men's basketball side these days spends most of its energy chasing South Korea, while the rivalry belongs to China — a contest that turned on its head in 2013, when Chinese Taipei knocked the mainland out at the quarter-final stage of the FIBA Asia Cup. Home games, when there are any at Taipei Heping Basketball Gymnasium, draw into a 7,000-seat hall in Daan District, and the crowd there knows the team by a nickname the Chinese-language press uses more than English ever does: the Blue Whales.

The results that still get mentioned are old ones. Fourth place at the 1959 World Championship remains the best finish the country has managed at that level, and the silver medals from the Asian Games in 1954 and 1958, followed by two more from the old ABC Championship in 1960 and 1963, belong to the same run of form. Bronze came twice more, in 1973 and 1989, before the team's best spell of the modern era arrived at the East Asian Games, where it won gold in 1997, 2001 and 2005, and at the William Jones Cup, taken in 2001 and 2004 — a tournament Taipei has hosted and treated as its own proving ground.

Among the players who carried that stretch, Lin Chih-chieh built a reputation hard enough to earn the name "the Beast," moving through Taiwan Beer, the Zhejiang Lions and the Taipei Fubon Braves over a career that outlasted most of his teammates'.

None of it traces back to 1954 in a straight line. The basketball association formed that year as the Republic of China Basketball Committee, and the national team played under the name Formosa until 1981, when readmission to FIBA under the Nagoya Resolution forced the switch to Chinese Taipei — a name drawn from politics rather than the game itself, and the one still worn today.

Latest results

All matches

16 Sep	Asian Games	Japan H	78:85	L
13 Sep	Asian Games	Qatar H	91:69	W
12 Sep	Asian Games	Iran H	69:72	L
10 Sep	Asian Games	Jordan A	83:80	W
1 Dec 2025	World Cup	Japan H	73:80	L
28 Nov 2025	World Cup	Japan A	64:90	L