China will meet Saudi Arabia in men's volleyball semifinal after a 3-1 win over Kazakhstan in Doha on Monday.

Saudi Arabia, which proceeds to the quarterfinals with a clean sheet, is at peak after beating Japan, the top seeds of the tournament, in straight sets.

Zhou Jian'an, China's newly-appointed head coach, kept low-key on the upcoming semifinal on Wednesday.

"Our opponents have proved their quality with the surprise win over Japan. We are not familiar with them, which required us more cautious preparation for the next match," said Zhou.

With their same lineup at the 2006 World Championships, China, the second seed of the tournament, won the match against Kazakhstan 25-21, 25-20, 24-26, 25-20.

"I'm not very satisfied with performance of my players today. They are very nervous and made many errors on serving and reception, but maybe it is because this is the first match," said Zhou.

Chinese players showed great improvement on blocking, which has been long regarded as their tender spot, in the one and half hour tussle. They scored 13 points with blocks in the match.

"We have strengthened blocking training after the world championship and I'm glad it was paid off," said Zhou. "That will also help us in the fight against well-rounded semifinal rivals."

It is the first time for Saudi Arabia, runner-up of the just-ended Arabian Championship, to enter the last-four competition of men's volleyball tournament at Asian Games. Their best Asiad's record was the fifth place at Seoul in 1986.

An all-rounded Saudi Arabia with strong winning determination proved "impossible is nothing" by trouncing error-prone Japan, the only men's Asian team to make the second round of the 2006 World Championship, 25-20, 27-25, 25-21.

Al Bakhet Ahmed A, the 1.93-meter spiker, has become the star of Saudi Arabia at the match by contributing 22 points to his team.

Yamamoto Takahiro, ace spiker of Japan said their poor performance had led to the loss of the match.

"We made a lot of net violations and other mistakes. That's why we lost the game," said Takahiro.

In another quarter final match of the day, defending champion South Korea beat Iran 3-1.

South Korea will face host Qatar in the semifinals. The latter defeated Bahrain 25-23, 25-16, 25-18 in front of more than 2,000 local fans on Monday night.

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain entered the quarterfinals as top finishers of Pool A and Pool B in preliminaries, while host Qatar has directly entered the last eight with five other world championship participants, namely China, Japan, South Korea, Iran and Kazakhstan.

The semifinals will be held on Wednesday, when the losers of the quarterfinal matches will take part in the 5th-8th play-off matches.