Chinese football sunk to new depths this year with the arrest of the head of the Chinese Football Association (CFA) Nan Yong and more than 20 other officials on match-fixing charges.
Zhu believes installing new officials at the CFA will not be enough to save the game if the question of who controls the top flight Chinese Super League (CSL) is not resolved.
"The scandal has just revealed the reasons why we previously have made little or no progress. We must be more concerned about how we move forward," he told Reuters in an interview.
"The matchfixing has showed us we cannot blindly approve of the way things have been done in the past. We have to move as quickly as possible to work out a way to selectively restructure it, to improve Chinese football," he added.
"Otherwise, even if you chop off the left hand, the right hand is still dirty."
"Who should control the CSL, a board of stakeholders or the CFA?" he asked. "Will the CSL be fair in the future? Is it really a professional league with clear goals, clear responsibilities and so on?"
"If the fairness of the CSL is in doubt, credibility fails," he said.
Lifting the "shadow" over the game, which has deepened with the matchfixing scandal, will take more than determination on the part of well-meaning officials.
"Personnel changes do not guarantee success or failure," Zhu added. "Is there a concrete plan, what is the plan, can it work? can it really improve Chinese football?
"If not, the (current) efforts will not only be completely wasted, but after five or ten years, another crackdown on matchfixing will again catch as many guilty people as this time."
He clearly has a great passion for the game and believes a healthy and clean domestic professional game will also help improve China's national team.
"Matchfixing kills real competition," he said. "The Chinese national team did so terribly in international games because they had little real competition in the domestic league.
"Their capability dropped.
