BEIJING — A crackdown on "age shaving" has found 36 players in China's professional basketball league were older than they originally stated, the official basketball association announced Tuesday.

No individual players were named in a report published in the Sports Ministry's official newspaper, China Sports Daily.

Officials have turned over the data to world basketball's governing body, FIBA, and the Asian Basketball Association in hopes of "winning their understanding," said Liu Xiaonong, the head of the association's Communist Party committee.

"In the future we will take whatever measures to strictly monitor player registrations," Liu said.

Players' ages are sometimes altered to show them as being younger, mainly to qualify them for youth tournaments. Those false ages stay with athletes and can result in embarrassment and regulatory sanctions when they move on to greater success.

The basketball association last month ordered teams to declare their players' true ages, checking them against a new nationwide police data base.

The opposite practice was alleged in the controversy surrounding the women's gymnastics competition in the Beijing Olympics, when China entered athletes suspected of being below the minimum age of 16 during an Olympic year to be eligible for competition.

The international gymnastics federation eventually cleared the Chinese gymnasts of amending birth records to appear older than they were, but continues to investigate the ages of Chinese gymnasts who competed in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

While a global problem, the falsifying of ages is considered particularly acute in China due to the massive pressure on coaches and officials to produce victories and the apparent ease with which false documents can be obtained.

Separately, state broadcaster CCTV said age manipulation was most common in China's basketball and football programs. The report cited former national team player Hao Wei as one of the most egregious examples, saying he had at various times registered five different birthdays ranging from 1973 to 1978.

It also mentioned continuing questions surrounding the true age of Yi Jianlian of the men's national basketball team, who now plays in the NBA for the New Jersey Nets. Yi has been dogged throughout his career by allegations he was born in 1984 instead of 1987 as officially stated.