FIBA will announce the four recipients of wild cards for the 2014 FIBA World Cup on Feb. 1, 2014. In an article on its official website, FIBA disclosed China Basketball Association’s three reasons why China deserves to receive a wild card.

First, basketball is enormously popular in China as the number of people who play basketball in the country is well over 100 million, and there are tens of thousands of teams that participate in the five-on-five and three-on-three format of the game every year.

Second, Chinese men’s team has been at the top of the medal table in Asia of for many years and also did fairly well at the Olympic Games and FIBA World Championships with quite a few internationally influential players like Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian and Wang Zhizhi.