Mostly genetics.  The Chinese Basketball Association is not a particularly good league and yet the Chinese players get dominated in it by foreign players who aren't close to NBA caliber.  Jared Sullinger is the outlier with a 5-year NBA career. 

https://basketball.realgm.com/international/league/40/Chinese-CBA/stats/2025/Averages/Qualified/All/points/All/desc/1/Regular_Season

Scroll down the list of top scorers and it looks like Lin Wei at #20 is the first Chinese player.  Scroll down a bit further for a blast from the past, Jordan Mickey (age 31) at #29 whose stats were:
PPG   RPG   APG   SPG   BPG
19.0   9.1   2.6   1.3   1.1

Quote from: tazzmaniac on Yesterday at 06:03:33 AM

Mostly genetics.  The Chinese Basketball Association is not a particularly good league and yet the Chinese players get dominated in it by foreign players who aren't close to NBA caliber.  Jared Sullinger is the outlier with a 5-year NBA career. 

https://basketball.realgm.com/international/league/40/Chinese-CBA/stats/2025/Averages/Qualified/All/points/All/desc/1/Regular_Season

Scroll down the list of top scorers and it looks like Lin Wei at #20 is the first Chinese player.  Scroll down a bit further for a blast from the past, Jordan Mickey (age 31) at #29 whose stats were:
PPG   RPG   APG   SPG   BPG
19.0   9.1   2.6   1.3   1.1

That?s crazy. A small country like Serbia has a half dozen NBA players. Even Japan has a few.

Some of it will be genetics, some of it will be the viability and traditions of professional sport within China, which has a very weird and very interesting history (look at the way the country built up their surf program from zero in the wake of it becoming an Olympic sport, for example).