Not only is it a viable sport in China, but it is a career with good prospects relative to the average income per capita there, which is about 1/4 of that in America.
FYI,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Income per capita in the US is about 62,000. Including money earned from sponsorship deals, you can count the number of American players that exceed this figure on the fingers of one hand, and it is impossible to win this amount in a single tournament.
Income per capital in China is about 16,000. Haitao Yu, when he won the Chinese 8-ball Masters earlier this year, won $147,234 which is over 9 times his country's income per capita.
Of course, American performance in the last three huge, internationally diverse, events has been terrible.
International 9-ball Open
Skyler (3rd place), SVB (4th place), and Justin Bergman (7th place) were the only Americans finishing in the top 16
Word 9-ball Championship, Dec 2018
SVB (3rd place) and Corey Deuel (5th place) were the only two Americans reaching stage 2, meaning final 16
US Open 9-ball Championship
SVB (9th place) was the one American reaching Stage 2, meaning final 16.
America just isn't holding it's own in the big international events, not even the ones contested on American soil.
The good news is that, in 2019, the American pool calendar added three additional WPA sanctioned events in a) the International 9-ball, b) the World 10-ball Championship, and c) the WPA Players Championship. Top Americans now have more opportunities to compete with the world's most elite players than they've had in many years. I, for one, believe this will raise the pedigree of the top Americans.