China.

Pick up any newspaper or log into any website and all the talk this Olympics is how the Chinese are going gangbusters in the medal count - 22 gold at last count to the USA's 13 - and how well they're doing it with vastly and unexpectedly superior performances.

Even the Chinese men's basketball team, dismissed as goners before the Olympics, pushed reigning champions Spain right to the brink a few nights ago.

Like Australia during Sydney 2000 the Chinese are flying high on adrenalin and patriotism at Beijing 2008.

But in the one sport where they can make the biggest international splash - football - the People's Republic have again been found wanting.

I wrote about the Chinese men's football team before the Olympics and warned that while the Chinese "do have the knack of turning on some decent football when the pressure is off" it's when "the pressure is on that they fall to pieces".

And they fall to pieces in the worst sort of fashion, by lashing out when things aren't going their way.

"In Asia," I wrote, "the Chinese have taken over the Australians' mantle as the most thuggish in the 46-member Asian Football Confederation."

And so it has been proved again.

The dismissal on Sunday night of two Chinese players during the hosts' opening match with Belgium was arguably the low point of the team's long and woeful disciplinary record and left them sitting ducks for a rampant Brazil in Qinhuangdao on Wednesday.

The first card came when Tianjin Teda defender Tan Wangsong got sent off for kicking his oppoiste number, AZ Alkmaar's Sébastien Pocognoli, in the balls.

The second came when their captain, Charlton Athletic midfielder Zheng Zhi, elbowed Ajax utility Jan Vertonghen in the face.

The womens' team, meanwhile, the so-called "Iron Roses", have had no such problem dropping the kung-fu antics and playing football this Olympics, defeating Sweden and Argentina and drawing with Canada (go figure) to top their group and cruise into the quarter-finals.

In a great piece for the International Herald Tribune, Edward Wong posits that "for Chinese men, finally proud that they have international sports icons like the basketball star Yao Ming and the hurdler Liu Xiang, the soccer team endures as the ultimate symbol of emasculation. So deep is the sense of shame surrounding men's soccer that the government has no choice but to allow people to vent".

Ouch.

But the real hurt, Wong argues, lies in something far more inexplicable.

"Soccer presents the ultimate conundrum for the Chinese sports machine: the country has the money, the population pool and the fan base to put together a world-class team, yet it has inexplicably failed to do so."

Precisely.

China may well top the medal count at the end of the Games, but the failure to make any discernible mark in the most popular, important and prestigious sport of all - men's football - means this Olympiad hasn't been the great "coming out party" for China everyone has tried to argue it is.

In a blog for China Daily Xu Jiang, a correspondent for Sports Illustrated, writes that "witnessing [the China-Belgium match], I felt so empty. The pain of the defeats was easier to bear than the fact they were not even ready after four years of preparation. It hurt me deeply."

At the Brazil-China match, which the hosts lost 3-0 to knock them out of contention for the quarters, he quotes a high-school teacher called Cui Wei as saying the South Americans play the game "Gentle and soft. They enjoy playing soccer" but the Chinese still "view it as a fight".

At least the hapless men's team got on the scoreboard in drawing with New Zealand in their final group match in Shanghai yesterday, but had to wait till the 87th minute to conjure the equaliser.

Hardly the startling rejoinder they would have hoped for. Even our dismal Olyroos managed to beat the underwhelming Kiwis before the Games kicked off.

So what needs to happen?

Like Australia before it, China must examine what it wants its football to express.

The Chinese do just as good a line in fighting spirit as we do, but there are few Chinese who want to see that writ large in their football.

Virtually all their other sporting teams, their economy, their military, whatever you care to name, loudly express the China we know and fear: huge, talented, strong, hungry and, most importantly, highly proficient.

For some unfathomable reason, proficiency seems to be the thing that has bypassed Chinese football completely.

But, sadly, I have more confidence in the Chinese putting that anomaly right than I do in our administrators getting the train wreck that is the Olyroos back on the rails.

Restoring face, as we have seen, is something the Chinese do awfully well.