New Delhi: Cricket Australia believes that China has the capability of becoming a cricket power to rival India.

According to The Age Cricket Australia is all set to take a leading role in teaching the Chinese to play the game and see the world's most populous nation as a vital frontier in the sport's expansion plans. And Twenty20 is seen as the best way of getting the Chinese hooked on it.

The Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland and chairman Creagh O'Connor will visit Beijing during the second week of the Games, but the board's manager of global development, Ross Turner, began working with the Chinese through the Asian Cricket Council in 2005.

"With its population of 1.3 billion people and its changing economy, China can one day be a cricket power to rival India," Turner was quated as saying by the newspaper.

"It may not be in five years, but it will certainly be within a decade. China has such a strategic approach to everything. They won't be benchmarking against some atoll in the Pacific, they will be saying what is the world standard and trying to better it, seeking prominence and world recognition."

Meanwhile, a leading corporate and commercial lawyer Ian McCubbin, an expert in Chinese-Australian affairs, believes that the aftermath of the Olympics will present a crucial opportunity to capitalise on the Communist country's widening interest in western sports.

"I don't think the success of cricket in China depends on having hundreds of thousands of people playing it in the park on a Saturday afternoon. I think it depends on promoting it as a television product," said McCubbin, who is also a legal adviser to China Central Television Network.

"Look at India, and the commercialisation of cricket there. There is no reason why that can't happen in China. It's a growing economy, it's a changing economy, but it's also an economy that is becoming an avid consumer of western culture," McCubbin said.

In fact, Guangzhou will host the 2010 Asian Games, where China will compete in cricket and for which two cricket grounds conforming to ICC standards will be built.