I don't know why but seem like women in China do better than men. Volley ball is another example. China is champion for women's volley ball but their men counterpart is nowhere. Is China's women too strong or world's women too weak?
I am not sure about differences in physique. But I'd like to give my 2 cents from the history and social status point of view.
The western countries (including Japan and Russia) started participating most modern sports much earlier than China, not to mention many of these sports were invented by westerners. But since the inception and for long time, most sports were exclusively for men. Meaningful participation by women only started as women got their social status equal to men. In most countries, that was after year 1900 or even later.
In China, modern sports started roughly around the time when the Qing dynasty was replaced by ROC in year 1911. Same as in most countries, the first participants were mostly men. Even among the Chinese males at the time, there were only very few could take part in sports because of extreme poverty, widespread undernutrition and the backward conservative mainstream culture of the time.
Fortunately for Chinese women, they gained the equal social status as Chinese men when the PRC was established in 1949. CPC has been taking sports participation by women seriously as a way to promote female liberation.
So in most modern sports, participation by Chinese men started probably 100 or even more years later than western men did, while the Chinese women started like 50 or less years later than the western women did.
In general, I would say that, for the Chinese male players, the gap in experience and knowledge between them and their competitors, are still greater than that for the female players.
This is of course not an execuse for the Chinese men's soccer players. They are beyond comprehension.
