China's professional basketball league begins its post season playoffs today with a pair of young and big centers looking to make their mark as the latest "Walking Great Wall," once famously led by the NBA's Yao Ming.

Reigning 2004 league champion Guangdong Hongyuan, boasting 2.12 meter (seven-feet) center Yi Jianlian, are set to go up against regular season champions Jiangsu Nangang and their 2.13 meter pivot Tang Zhendong.

Both teams, however, need to get through the first round of the playoffs before meeting up.

Tang led Jiangsu to a 35 win, three loss regular season and was the league's scoring champion with 916 points, averaging 24.1 points and 11.9 rebounds per game.

The quicker Yi, scored 17.4 points and had just under nine rebounds a game as the defending champions ended the regular season with a 30-8 record, the second best in the league.

Both are only at the beginning of their careers and are seen as the future big men of Chinese basketball, with Tang just turning 20 and Yi, already a member of the national team, still only 17.

They are the present incarnation of China's "Walking Great Wall" of basketball centers, after their elder fellow seven footers, Yao Ming, Wang Zhizhi and Menk Bateer graduated to the NBA.

NBA All Star Yao plays for the Houston Rockets and Wang for the Miami Heat, while earlier this year Bateer returned to China to play for the Beijing Ducks and could do battle against both Tang and Yi in the playoffs.

After playing in three league matches in February, Bateer was selected to Sunday's league All-Star Game where he was named most-valuable-player, scoring 28 points and leading the northern All Stars to a 103-99 win over the south.

"Yi Jianlian still needs experience, but he has been getting better and gained a lot of confidence since playing in the Olympics," Jason Dixon, an American center who plays on the Guangdong team, said.

"He still needs to work on his inside game, but since Guangdong has a lot of big guys and inside scorers he hasn't had the chance to score like Tang."

Dixon, who is averaging 20 points and 10 rebounds a game, has played for six years in Guangdong and is the longest serving foreign player in the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA).

An injury to his foot has limited his play this year and contributed to some of his team's losses. But after undergoing a foot operation in January, he is expected to do battle in the playoffs.

Guangdong also boasts two other national team players in 23-year-old slasher Du Feng and 21-year-old sharpshooting forward Zhu Fangyu, both veterans of China's historic eighth place finish at the Athens Olympics.

"Du Feng and Zhu Fangyu are both important parts of our team," Guangdong head coach Li Chunjiang said.

"Although we have not been playing real well this year, both are working hard. They both played in the Olympics, so they know what their shortcomings are, compared to the best players in the world and they know what they have to do to improve."

Li said that with steady improvement both Du and Zhu were poised to become the main outside scorers of China's national team, a role played by legendary Chinese players such as Hu Weidong, Sun Jun and Zheng Wu, all of whom are coaching league clubs this year.

"Already Du and Zhu are better than guys like Hu Weidong and Sun Jun were at the same age, so if they work hard they could become the focus of the next national team," Li said.

Hu, a mainstay of China's national team for much of the 1990s, is Jiangsu's player-coach and can still knock down the three pointer, scoring 50 points in a game earlier this season.

Jiangsu also boast American small forward Ryan Forehan-Kelly, who is averaging 18 points a game this season, while the team are trying to bring in former NBA power forward Jeelani McCoy for the playoff drive.

Bateer's return has also reinvigorated Beijing with the Ducks now experimenting with a "twin tower" line up of Bateer and American import Olumide Oyedeji, who tore up the league this year with a 22 point, 16 rebound average per game.

In the mini-southern division playoff, Jiangsu will face fourth place Yunnan Honghe in a best of three game series, while Guangdong face the military's seven-time champion Bayi Rockets, featuring five former and current national team players, including perennial Asian terror Liu Yudong.

In the northern division, champions Liaoning face Jilin, while second place Beijing go against Xinjiang.

Following the divisional playoffs, the top teams from each division will face the third and fourth place teams from the opposite division, in the eight-team final round.

This means that Jiangsu and Guangdong could face each other in both the divisional and final playoff series.

(China Daily March 9, 2005)