(XINHUA)

China's vice sports minister Cai Zhenhua was elected president of the Chinese Football Association (CFA) on January 21.

In the first reshuffle of the CFA executive board in a decade, Cai was unanimously voted as the replacement for 75-year-old Yuan Weimin, who had acted as CFA president since 1992.

Cai, 53, a former table tennis world champion and national team coach, will be faced with the daunting task of revitalizing the sport in the country. China's men's soccer team has only participated in the World Cup once, in 2002, when they lost all three group matches without scoring a goal. The women's team has similarly fallen from their peak in the late 1990s, when they became the 1996 Olympics runners-up and the 1999 World Cup silver medalists.