Giving a top 400 player a run for her money in a very long very competitive set (the most for her opponent this far) is as stated no mean achievement particularly after coming through three rounds of qualifying. Her opponents here have been well resourced (thats an assumption that they are supported by the Chinese state) girls generally in their early twenties battled hardened after 2-4 years of competing on the Asian predominantly Chinese part of the ITF tour with exposure ranging from 15 -100 K tournaments for almost all of them.

It wont be long before CD will be referencing how they do it in China as opposed to France as potential ways to improve the performance of the LTA Like the way they are approaching football it looks like the Chinese have a good look round with a view to doing things properly.

Yes its the grass roots academies I was referring to not their domestic football league.

So far in 2018 though, with comparable numbers of events at both $25K and $60K, the strength of the Asian and specifically Chinese events (they being the only Asian $60K), have held up very well to Europe, and far surpassing North American even though NA has held more events.
The fulness of time may have the Asian events weaker by years end (as happened last year, though the gap has been closing over time), but thus far it's not true.

I'm in the process of backdating this to add in all $15K and WTA too, and add in all the WC/LL/Q/SE/JE, as I've found a way to handle them all together. It will take a long time to get the past data together though, and then give the full regional picture about tournament strengths.

A reasonable supposition.
With so many players in the NA market though, always on hand to play in domestic events, and cheap subsidised domestic travel meaning they can get to every NA event, I would have thought the same would be true there too.
The argument could go: There's a small pool of available players to the Chinese/Asian events, each does well most weeks and gets high rewards despite lower quality of competition overall despite apparent rankings.
NA meanwhile has lots of very similarly ranked players in a very competitive weekly environment - anyone can beat anyone else on any given occasion in any given week. This means that the points are spread out amongst a lot of 'good' players and no small group rises above to then consequently earn higher rankings and drag the medians up.
Might be true.
But, the Asian events to date have also attracted a fair number of good Europeans and Australians, especially at their top end. For the theory to hold completely you'd have to have the coincidence that the well ranked outsiders that have gone to China/Asia this year were in the majority themselves also 'over-ranked' in their own markets, where as none of the NA Europeans were - only 'good' Europeans went to the NA events.
This makes it unlikely to be true, to my mind, until such time as enough data shows otherwise.
I think that the baked-in notion of 'weak' Asian events was certainly once very true. It still is true, but the gap has narrowed more than peoples pre-conceived and received opinions have kept pace with the change, and the effect is much less than supposed in the average interpretation. It's also trending closer together slowly, over a decadal rather than annual frame of reference.

I have all the player-by-player charts for these events, but it's not a like-for-like comparison, as the figures in those Wikipedia tables are all from the week prior to the playing of the event rather than the rankings on the days the matches were actually played - which is what I use (I could use the other date easily enough but want to use the same listings that we do in our results postings here - day of match).
The point about holding large ITF events during IW/Miami has credence. You're still then asking Europeans to set that month aside to play 2 $60K on hard courts instead of gearing up for the clay seasson back home. For me the point is that this year they have managed to get those Euro players to make the trip where as in the past that hasn't been the case. Thus the events ended up being as strong as other events held elsewhere during other weeks. Whatever drove that strength, the events were not weak.
For the $25K in Asia, they have been held in weeks where there were also comparable NA events, yet the Asian events have been stronger still.
Next week looks very interesting, as the ITF scene is a shambles, very top heavy, but instructive for field strengths.

We'll be able to see a good direct comparison across all regions. I only wish that the US were not holding a $60K & $25K in the same week, as that will diffuse that market.