China clinched 164 gold medals, 88 silvers and 63 bronzes by the end of Thursday, the penultimate day of the 15-day tournament with the last two gold medals on offer on Friday.

Chinese men's basketball team will face hosts Qatar in the final.

It has been the seventh time that China topped the medals table in Asian Games.

"Despite the fact that China successfully fulfilled its set goal for the Doha Asian Games, we are well aware of our weaknesses when analyzing our performance," said Liu.

"What important is we keep a clear head during the build-up for the Beijing Olympic Games," he said. The Chinese capital will stage the 2008 Olympic Games in August.

"Our excellent performance in the continental Games will not indicate or mean that we have the same performance in Olympic Games," he said. "Asian Games is different from the Olympics in many ways such as sports program, rules, qualification and grouping."

In track and field, China once again topped the medals table with 14 golds, nine silvers and eight bronzes but in the Athens Olympics, only two golds with no silver nor bronze were brought home by Chinese athletes.

Liu Xiang raced to win the men's 110m hurdles championship in Athens where 20-year-old Xing Huina bagged a women's 10,000m title.

Liu eased to win his favorite event here in 13.15, 0.27 outside his own world record set in Lausanne in July while Xing was missing from the quadrennial event due to injury.

China had 16 golds, 22 silvers and 6 bronzes in swimming but in Athens Luo Xuejuan, who did not show up here owing to falling form and injury, grabbed the only swimming gold for China before a women 's 4x200m freestyle relay silver.

"A small number of our elite athletes lost their usual form and made some faults, which rings alarm for us," Liu said but refused to name the athletes he referred to.

Favorite Yang Wenjun only had a fifth-place finish in the men's 100m canoe single before taking a silver in men's 500m canoe double, in which he and Meng Guanliang gave China the first ever rowing gold in an Olympic Games in Athens.

In the women's tennis team event, Australian and Wimbledon Open doubles winner Zheng Jie and Asian top women's singles player Li Na both lost to their opponents from Uzbekistan when favorites China were stopped in the quarterfinals.

Men's vault world champion Xiao Qin and all-round world winner Yang Wei did not shine in the vault event as Chinese gymnasts lost the title for the first time in 32 years in Asian Games history.

"Pressure might be the one of the reasons for their unexpected loss. There is a silver lining in the failure as we can find the problem in time for the Olympics," he said.

China fielded a 928-member delegation here, including 647 athletes at an average age of 23.3, competing in 362 events from 37 sports.

China pulled off 150 golds, 84 silvers and 74 bronzes in the Busan Asian Games four years ago.

The Doha Games ran from Dec. 1 through to Dec. 15, seeing 39 sports take place in the capital city of Qatar.

Over 8,000 athletes came to Doha to make it a biggest ever Asian Games.