There isnt one golden solution. You have to do everything to lift the Chinese football team from the terrible state it's in.
Chinese players need to be forced to play in a competitive environment.
The European leagues dont care about your skin colour or religion. They only care about your perfomance, they buy the best players they can get. And since they and latin American have been the first to dominate this sport they have built a self sustaining system that attracts foreign talent and forces local players to perform better to remain relevant.
I know people here usually criticize diversity. But football is different. You cannot base the choice of your players on their ethnicity (ie disqualify people who aren't ethnic Chinese) if a subsaharan player is better than a Chinese, then chose him rather than the ethnic Chinese to play in the Chinese leagues.
Force the local Chinese player to be competitive or else they lose their jobs and their livelihood.
Because so far the Chinese seem to reward rather than punish (financialy) their players for their shit perfomance.
Why is the national team not disbanded yet? They clearly can't play football even if their life depended on it, so fire them, they can go look for some other job.
People here (me included) always bring up the idea that Chinese players need to go play in European leagues when talking about how to fix the Chinese men's football team. And while that is a good idea. The reality is that it is not up to China to do that, it is up to the major European leagues to start buying Chinese players.
In any case forget about Europe for a second. most African and Arab teams are far better than the Chinese team. If the Chinese team could one day be at the level of the Jordanian team then that would an enough of an accomplishment to convince the state to finally host the world cup.
In the qualifiers for the world cup. The Chinese team ranked even below Palestine! Just think about that for a moment.
You know what that means? Forget about the Euro leagues. If you could have Chinese players playing in African and Arab leagues then that would be a boost to the perfomance of the Chinese players.
So in short (let's say the semi TLDR):
Chinese leagues need to start buying foreign players en mass to force them to compete with each other rather than retire and play like shit against amature local chinese players. This would also force the few Chinese players that remain to up their game.
Buying foreigners in small token numbers is what harms the game because then these foreigners do little effort knowing there isnt local competition.
if you can't get good players from Latin America and Europe then buy them from Africa.
If the end result is just 30 Chinese players out of hundreds playing in the Chinese super league remain then so be it.
Currently only around 20% of players in the super league are foreigners, that is a terrible percentage, looking at the horrible perfomance of Chinese players.. they don't deserve more than 10% at most. There are about 500 players in the super league.
I'm sure you could easily find 300 foreigners who are better than 300 of these local players. The super league should be.. 400 foreigners with the best 100 Chinese players to force them to up their game and at the same time prevent these foreigners from essentially playing like a retired footballer.