Author's Preface

The preface to ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 中国电子竞技幕后史 自序

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 10, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19609949

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

The Guanzi says: it takes ten years to grow a tree and a hundred years to cultivate a person. There is a great deal of truth in that. The line is about training people, but widen the lens a little and it is also about how a culture forms. Chinese esports has been going for more than ten years now and has reached a certain scale, but turning that into something with cultural depth is a job we have only just begun. This history of what happened behind the scenes records the first twelve years of Chinese esports, from 1998 to 2010, as a reference for research in the future.

Why call it the history behind Chinese esports?

These days plenty of people can reel off the names of the stars. Ma Tianyuan, China's first WCG StarCraft 2v2 world champion. Meng Yang, the first to take the one million yuan prize at the Great Wall Challenge. Li Xiaofeng, WE.SKY, twice a WCG world champion. Wu Sheng, known as 2009, a DotA world champion. WE.Ruofeng, the newly crowned League of Legends world champion. And so on. But how many of the people behind the scenes could they name? Hardly any, I suspect. Many even think esports consists of nothing but these players and casters.

In fact Chinese esports has a great many people behind the scenes, and a great many stories, that have never been shown in public. Yet it was their friendships and their feuds, the good times and the bad they shared, and their countless attempts, experiments and dead ends that finally shaped the scene into what it is today.

From outside the circle, esports looks calm enough. From inside, it looks like something else entirely. This book exists to show you what esports looks like to those of us who work in it.

Right, back to the first question. What is esports?

The General Administration of Sport of China once produced a very doctrinaire definition. I will not repeat it here; it is on Baidu Baike. Let me give you esports as I understand it.

Esports is the process of deciding a winner fairly through a video game.

What counts as an esports discipline?

Any video game that can decide a winner fairly is an esports discipline.

Plenty of people will start swearing at this point, because by my definition I have insulted the sacred "esports" they carry in their heads.

Online games cannot be esports. Games where you kill monsters and level up cannot be esports. We have to draw a clear line between ourselves and spiritual opium. I have heard all of it, and worse, over the past ten-odd years.

But I will say this: all that abuse is a form of self-deception, a refusal to look beyond your own circle, an excuse a lot of kids use to feel better about playing games.

How do I know? Because I used that excuse myself. I used esports as my own shield too. We all know it perfectly well, and nobody wants to say it out loud.

Up to 2010, looking back over those twelve years, the disciplines everyone in China agreed to call esports were not many. StarCraft, Counter-Strike, Warcraft III, DotA. You can count them on one hand. Is that really all of them? Stay calm and read on.

If we were talking playing cards, those four are the big jokers. There is no question about the size of their audiences or the depth of their influence. But go into detail and there are others: Quake, before Counter-Strike, and Delta Force and Duke Nukem, and CrossFire later on; Age of Empires and Civilization alongside StarCraft; FIFA, Winning Eleven and Need for Speed; some people would even name The King of Fighters and Street Fighter. By the standard I set out above, that any video game which can decide a winner fairly is an esports discipline, all of these qualify. But I think these disciplines had bad luck. Why do I say that?

Three reasons.

1. They were born too early. Before 1998 the internet was not yet widespread in China. As late as 1999 you could still register a QQ number of fewer than six digits. Organisers did exist behind these games, but they worked in tiny circles. You would rule the arcade or the computer room, an early form of the internet café, on your own street, then go off and challenge players somewhere else. I did that myself, and that was as far as it went. That era was never going to give these titles the conditions they needed to be recognised as esports disciplines.

2. They were niche. This is the reason that gets me sworn at, because diehard fans hate admitting that the game they play is niche. Age of Empires and Civilization, for instance. The diehards of those games see nothing but friends and circles full of people playing the same thing, so of course that is how it feels to them. I understand it completely.

The size of an audience is a relative thing. People who play Go feel everyone around them plays Go. People who play football feel everyone around them plays football. Which group is bigger? China's population is so large that a few thousandths of one per cent is still a lot of people. It is only a comparison.

1. Unclear positioning. What does that mean? It is a fairly complicated reason, and it touches on how we position a competitive game as a product and how a brand gets built. If a title was never positioned towards esports in the first place, or wanted to be and did it badly, the result is a wasted chance. Later chapters will keep returning to this with real examples.

All of which made trouble for me when it came to writing the history. Some of these disciplines I never took part in myself. The people behind them wrote very little down, and they are now scattered across the country. Do I write about them or leave them out? That hesitation kept me from starting for a long time.

While I was stuck on it, I thought of Occam's razor, and everything became clear. I decided to set those titles aside and finish the main line I had lived through myself, then fill in the rest over time. Perhaps a rough first attempt will draw out better qualified people to complete it, which would suit everyone.

On the difficulties and obstacles esports has run into.

Many people say Chinese esports grew slowly because the state paid it no attention and because the Olympics have no esports event. That is muddled thinking.

The idea comes from a habit of mind we grow up with: that athletes should be raised by the state, shut away and trained from childhood, and grow up to win Olympic gold and bring glory to the country.

We are like a flock of silent lambs. We are raised from birth, we are sheared, and in the end we are eaten, and we take all of it as the natural order of things. We have completely forgotten that sport began, and exists, as something built from the bottom up so that a whole population becomes fitter, not as a way to train a squad of commandos to fetch medals on our behalf. Those medals neither represent nor improve the physical condition of the rest of us.

American gold medallists come out of a complete chain of school and university sport. Our own Olympic athletes are produced by a process that belongs to a different world from our schools and universities. How is that supposed to improve the fitness of ordinary people?

In 1998 broadband and internet cafés spread quickly across China, and Chinese esports finally came out of the arcades and the computer rooms and gained a large platform where people could talk to one another. I count that as the real beginning of Chinese esports, and from that point on a lot of people hoped the state would support it.

But in those days, when we had not worked out what esports was ourselves, the government still saw us as a bunch of kids playing games, so nobody paid us any attention.

Just as well that they did not.

So from that point Chinese esports developed on its own resources, like Spartan children left out on the mountainside, feeling their way forward stubbornly and alone. Most of the time it was about survival rather than growth.

And yet it was in exactly that environment that, over those ten-odd years, esports became the most popular and most widely played form of entertainment on Chinese campuses. It cost little, it ran on modest hardware, it was easy to organise and rewarding to play, and it became the shared memory of a generation.

With that, a genuine sport had been born on Chinese soil, built from the bottom up, with a complete chain behind it and enormous reach. Chinese esports owned very nearly the whole of China's university market.

And at a moment like that you want an esports event at the Olympics? You want the state to start raising Olympic champions from childhood by its usual methods?

Leave aside for now that esports runs against the Olympic principle of physical exertion. Dragging something that was born in a market economy and grew well there back inside the planned economy is a step backwards in history.

But esports never made money. That awkward business of sitting on a gold mine without knowing how to dig it lasted until 2010, when players and casters began building their own followings and turning that attention into sales on Taobao. They no longer had to live on unreliable advertising and sponsorship, and esports had finally worked out a way to generate its own revenue.

It is worth saying plainly that this model had existed for years. Esports people were too proud to lower themselves to it, and a great many opportunities were lost as a result. Later chapters will have a lot to say about that.

Many people also say the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television banned esports broadcasts on free-to-air channels because it did not understand the subject. That is even further from the truth. The opposite is the case: they understood very well how much games and esports attract users and what that is worth, and they simply had other plans. What lay behind it was a fight for power at ministry level, no less ruthless than an espionage war.

In terms of dates, the golden periods run like this. StarCraft from 1998 to 2003. Counter-Strike from 1999 to 2005. Warcraft III from 2003 to 2008. DotA from 2007 to 2012. Roughly five years each. The third year is usually the peak, when the stars and the great names come thick and fast. The fourth year holds steady while slipping. The fifth accelerates into decline. After that the game does not disappear, it is just pushed slowly to the margins. That is the normal life cycle I have observed in China for an esports game that catches the right moment, the right conditions and the right people.

As for how this book is written, I will try to keep it light, and I will write mainly about people.

Finally, an apology in advance. This book is certain to leave a lot of people out, because there are simply too many unsung heroes behind Chinese esports, including many I have only heard of and never met. All I can do is be as thorough as possible. If you took part in this history, please help fill in the gaps, so that together we can complete a history that belongs to our own youth.