Volleyball national side

China

National team · China

95 Matches

38 wins

57 losses

154–199 Sets

−45 Difference

1.6 Average per match

Form W W W W L L

The Beijing Gymnasium, better known as the Capital Gymnasium, is where the national side gathers its crowd for the matches that matter most, though the squad spends far more of its year at training bases in Qinhuangdao and Shenyang than under its roof.

The Chinese Volleyball Association, formed in 1953 and admitted to the FIVB the following year, oversees a team whose history was interrupted rather than steady: the side stopped competing during the Cultural Revolution and was pieced back together in 1976 under the State Physical Culture and Sports Commission. What followed took decades to show results. The men reached a fifth-place finish at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, still the closest China has come to a men's volleyball medal on home soil.

Continental results have come more freely than global ones. Gold at the Asian Games in 1986, 1990 and 1998, and Asian Championship titles in 1979, 1997 and 1999, built a rivalry with Japan and South Korea that plays out at nearly every regional tournament without ever needing a name of its own. The most recent Asian Cup win, in 2022, came the same year China lost the Asian Games final to Iran.

Vital Heynen took over as head coach in April 2024, arriving from Belgium to a team still working out how it fits among the world's best. The Nations League that year ended at 16th place, one win against the United States against fourteen defeats, and a place at the Paris Olympics never came. What did come was the Challenger Cup, won later in 2024, which puts China back in the Nations League for 2025 — the next real measure of whether Heynen's side has closed any of the distance to the sport's top tier.

Latest results

Fixtures and results

3 Oct	Asian Games	Pakistan H	0:3	L
2 Oct	Asian Games	Japan A	2:3	L
1 Oct	Asian Games	Thailand A	3:0	W
29 Sep	Asian Games	South Korea A	3:2	W
28 Sep	Asian Games	Philippines H	3:0	W
27 Sep	Asian Games	Chinese Taipei H	3:2	W