Chapter 2. A Hundred Schools of Esports Contend

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二 电子竞技的百家争鸣

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 16, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19614572

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 years around 2000 were an extraordinarily lively period in the history behind Chinese esports. It looked very much like the Spring and Autumn and Warring States era, when a hundred schools of thought contended with one another. A great explosion of ideas about esports had begun.

Through the growth of 1998 and 1999, internet cafés, games, tournaments, QQ and the internet itself all spread rapidly, and they connected enormous numbers of people who would otherwise never have had anything to do with one another. Everybody was astonished by the appeal of competitive games and by the social energy they released. People were excited. They felt that this was something real, and yet hardly anyone could say clearly what it was.

I once saw an early documentary about Jack Ma (Ma Yun) on the CCTV programme Oriental Horizon. Ma was excitedly explaining to his colleagues and his superiors what the internet was. He was excited, but he could not explain it clearly either, and the people listening were completely lost. They got excited along with him all the same. Esports was in exactly the same state at that time. Perhaps it was that mixture of excitement and confusion that stirred people's urge to explore, and so the great explosion of ideas began, and a hundred schools contended.

Hu Binguo (red-apple)

In 1999, Wang Yinxiong (kulou.csa) put together something he called the Weapons Register of Chinese StarCraft on the CSA website. I assume he was a fan of wuxia novels, since a weapons register is the ranking of the greatest fighters in that genre. He ranked the hundred strongest StarCraft players in China and placed himself 55th. First place went to red-apple, whose real name was Hu Binguo. Some readers may already have noticed that his English handle, red apple, or hong pingguo in Chinese, is a play on the sound of his own name.

red-apple was a lucky man. Around 2000, at the height of the frenzy of speculation on internet concepts, he secured one million yuan from Tengtu Electronic Publishing House as an investment in the concept of esports. I would not dare to claim that this was the first venture investment in the history of esports, but as far as I can remember, no one had ever raised a sum like it before.

So, after Chinese New Year in 2000, red-apple and several colleagues set out the plan for developing esports as they saw it:

1. Set up a players' club that would draw in a wide membership and provide systematic services to ordinary players

2. Establish an independent information service system, including a magazine, a website and partnerships with a range of media

3. Build a systematic competition structure, so that its events would be the first domestic league with a fixed calendar of fixtures

4. Create a complete competition network, forming a year-round, continuous system of online and offline events

5. Give members opportunities for international exchange, and organise international electronic entertainment competitions

Surprising, isn't it? Even now, twelve years later, the ideas in that plan look well ahead of their time. It is like reading the works of Han Feizi: our predecessors already understood things very deeply a very long time ago. But a lack of practical experience, along with the absence of the right timing, the right place and the right people, also produced red-apple's misfortune.

red-apple had a favourite saying. You drop a little detail here, you drop a little detail there, and in the end they add up to an astonishing hole that cannot be patched.

Unfortunately, although red-apple worked meticulously, although his colleagues worked hard, and although the CESA national tournament had a wide impact, the times were against him, and the approach he tried ran ahead of the actual conditions of the day. The result was that the sponsor withdrew its money early.

The direction was right and the thinking was good. The pity was that the market was not ready. Sponsors pay because they expect a return. If I give you one yuan today and you can earn two tomorrow, then the day after that a sponsor will give you whatever you ask for. It is a very simple principle, and yet to this day many people still do not understand it. They hold out a hand to a sponsor without ever thinking about how they are going to earn that money back for them. Even if the sponsor says it does not care about making money, do not believe it. Trust me, one day it will want to. At any time, only those who think about danger while they are safe last for long.

red-apple left Tengtu Electronic Publishing House. At the invitation of Chen Dong, deputy general manager of Wuhan Aomei Electronics, he joined Aomei and took charge of localising and publishing games. Many people know that Aomei licensed the three most popular games in China at that time: Diablo, StarCraft and Counter-Strike. But in an age when pirated copies were everywhere, the impression Aomei left behind may not have been a friendly one, because they were always the ones putting on a stern face and going after piracy. What they were doing was right. There was no way around it. Perhaps this is what people mean by the mark an era leaves on you.

Hong Zhefu, ID hongzf

The man from Harbin who comes on stage next is a legendary figure, and a controversial one. He defeated red-apple and also inherited his mantle, moving from playing to organising esports events behind the scenes. His name is Hong Zhefu, ID hongzf.

Hong Zhefu was born on August 9, 1977, in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, and graduated from the English department of Heilongjiang University. Take note of that educational background, because it sent a boy who had been mad about games since childhood down a very different esports road. He paid far more attention to esports news from abroad than most.

How obsessed with games was Hong Zhefu? We all played arcade games as children and we were all fascinated by them, but Hong Zhefu's obsession probably went further than most of us ever managed. Without telling his family, he spent 3,800 yuan of new year money he had been saving for years on an arcade cabinet to play at home. The cabinet was too wide to fit through the door, so he called in workmen to take the door off. When his mother came home and found the door gone, she was stunned.

The day before the 2004 WCG China national final, I went to Beijing with the CGA news team to cover WCG, and I happened to arrive just as the Chinese ESWC delegation was returning from France. At that year's ESWC world finals the Chinese women's team had lost to Brazil and taken silver, and I was sent to cover their celebration dinner. Hong Zhefu, who was in charge of the project and was also the team manager, received me.

That was the first time I met Hong Zhefu. He had a square face, he smiled as he talked, he was confident, his voice carried, his eyes were bright and he was solidly built. He spoke standard Mandarin with no northeastern accent. My first impression was that this was a very capable man.

The dinner went smoothly. After he had seen off several senior women executives from the sponsor China Netcom, he wanted to find somewhere the two of us could talk. We wandered around for a long time without finding anywhere suitable, so in the end we simply sat on a bench outside the Central University of Finance and Economics and talked for two hours.

Hong Zhefu used his computer to show me a lot of video from ESWC, and it made a deep impression on me. There was an Italian host who spoke several languages and who was funny enough to work up a crowd. The lighting design in the arena was dazzling. The monitor in front of each competition station and the light above each player's head went out when that player was killed, so matches often came down to just two lights still burning, one on each side. The atmosphere they built was superb.

These are techniques that people are still imitating today without getting them right, and Hong Zhefu brought them back from the ESWC events of 2003 to 2005. Because there was no video platform such as Youku at the time, however, much of that footage has never been released to this day. Perhaps this is what it means for the timing to be wrong.

In 2005, ZAX and I were in Beijing on business and went to see Hong Zhefu at his company to discuss ESWC 2005. I found his office interesting. On one side hung the sign of the ESWC China organising committee, and on the other hung a sign for biotechnology fertiliser. We had already started StarsWar by then, and we all knew that in that period running tournaments was something that only looked beautiful from the outside. After 2005 I heard that he had devoted himself to the fertiliser business and had withdrawn from the esports scene.

WE.KinG, Pei Le

There is one more man who started in 1999 and has never left the scene since. He is WE.KinG, Pei Le. That year he was 19, a native of Xi'an, shy and reserved, tall and thin, slow and measured in speech, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, refined and scholarly.

KinG has lived through very nearly every stage of Chinese esports. In the arcade fighting days of The King of Fighters, he and a few friends formed a team that ruled the few streets around his home, spending their days challenging other arcades and being challenged in turn. They came across StarCraft as soon as it appeared in 1998.

In 1999 internet cafés began to appear in Xi'an on a large scale. This deserves a special note. Internet cafés first spread through China from west to east: Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangxi, Xi'an, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Hefei and so on. Why that order? It is simple. Those places were relatively poor, relatively closed off, and heavily populated. Few people owned a computer of their own, and with so many people the demand for internet cafés was large. Inland areas had few channels for getting information from the outside world, so network bandwidth spread there quickly and well.

Internet cafés in Xi'an were opening like mad. Today somebody would open one with 200 machines, tomorrow another with 300, the day after that one with 800, three floors of computers, all of them the newest and best specification. To attract business, café owners courted esports by every means available. Every café kept a semi-professional team of its own, and in every café you walked into you would see a wall covered with large photographs and profiles of the starting players on that café's team.

Why was the esports atmosphere in Xi'an, Chengdu and Chongqing so good in those years? Because the people working behind the scenes in esports had so many chances to practise their craft.

Go and propose an esports partnership and you could easily get the use of the machines for free. Add to that the many tournaments large and small, with plenty of prize money, enough to support a team. If you wanted to run an event yourself, you could talk to a café owner you knew: free machines, free publicity, and quite possibly the prize money and the prizes as well. With an environment that good, a very large number of the people who worked behind the scenes in esports came from the inland provinces.

In an internet café in Xi'an, KinG and his King of Fighters teammates discovered that StarCraft had something called battle.net, and that the people and the world you could meet there went far beyond the few streets around them. That drew these kids in deeply. There was a team in that café called ROSE, which was already well known online. KinG and his friends thought it odd that a group of grown men had picked such a feminine name, so he suggested that they choose something more masculine themselves. That is how the LION team was born.

Many of the members of LION came from the computer science department of Xidian University in Xi'an, so their website and forum kept getting better. I met KinG in Xi'an in 2002, but I had known about the LION forum since 2000. LION developed along the same legion-style lines as most teams of that period: branches all over the country, recruiting everywhere, a great show of strength. Once, during a busy stretch of summer tournaments, LION won five championships in two days in different regional divisions across the country, and all of them were offline events.

In an age of exploding ideas, legendary things happen easily too. Just as KinG and his teammates were starting to get results, a very mysterious man appeared. He looked wealthy, and he said he wanted to package LION the way Korean professional teams were packaged.

As a trial run, the mysterious man took seven or eight LION members to Shanghai for a tournament called the Aomeng Cup. They stayed in a presidential suite, ate and drank well every day, and he bought each of them a pile of clothes. He even proposed sending KinG and another team manager to South Korea, but KinG was young and did not dare to go.

They lived like that, as if in a dream, for a month. Then the mysterious man suddenly vanished. With no money for food, the group could do nothing but sleep in the presidential suite all day.

One morning KinG got up and found KISS, a tall, heavy member of the team, in tears. Puzzled, he asked why. KISS said that somebody had stolen and eaten the instant noodles he had hidden away. KinG did not know whether to laugh or cry, and he decided he had to find a way to get everyone home.

The first problem was how to get out of the hotel, because they could not pay for the presidential suite. The only method left to them was a rather sorry one. The others went out first with the luggage while KinG walked out in his pyjamas and slippers, pretending to be going shopping. That was how they got away. Then at the railway station they turned out to be a few yuan short of the train fare. KinG pleaded with the ticket clerk, who ignored him, so he had to beg from passers-by. In the end one passer-by gave them some money, and that was how they got back to Xi'an.

That shattered dream of a trip woke the 19-year-old KinG up completely. Too many firsts, too many highs and lows, made KinG realise that he was still too young. So KinG went to the Xi'an Foreign Languages Institute and settled down to study English. Let us leave KinG to his books for a while. Two years later, he would return.

In 2000, StarCraft produced a great many legendary figures. Many of them were positive, and of course plenty of them were negative as well. That is hardly surprising. This was an explosion, after all, not a controlled demolition.

The bugs and cheats of StarCraft 1.04 break out

Where there is a game there will inevitably be bugs and cheats. Even now, the operators of competitive games and platforms are still fighting cheats. The difference is that operators today care about the impact of cheating because there is a clear commercial interest at stake. In that era, the people making anti-cheat tools got no return of any kind, and that is why cheating went unsolved for so long.

There is no need to explain again that cheats destroy a game. Let us talk instead about how the people working behind the scenes in esports tried their best to deal with the problem.

In early 2000 the well-known esports figure Hanyuliang, who is said to work at Tencent now in a role that is also related to esports, put forward two proposals. One was to set up an authoritative panel of referees. The other was a plan for turning esports professional.

Take the referees first. Hanyuliang's thinking was a little like hiring a few all-seeing head chefs to watch the kitchen so that the cooks would not dare to play tricks. He carefully vetted and recruited a small number of experienced StarCraft players with good reputations to form a panel of referees, who would go into the game itself and observe matches as they were played, so as to guarantee that competition was fair.

Then there was the plan for turning esports professional. Hanyuliang proposed approaching the national sports administration, or a large group such as Sina, to fund and organise events and to establish clubs, following the path South Korea had taken at the time, where television stations and large groups such as Samsung supported the professionalisation of esports.

I have never met Hanyuliang, but I have heard a great deal about him, and after reading a lot of material about him I feel that this was a man who genuinely wanted to build esports. He was trying every possible way to find a road forward for the esports of that era. At the very least, he was making the effort to think.

But looking back from twelve years later, the wrong era and a lack of experience meant that his efforts were bound to be in vain. The decline of StarCraft caused by cheating could not be reversed by human supervision, and asking the state and large enterprises to support something new that was being called "electronic heroin" at the time was very likely to be met with a cold shoulder. Besides, that way of thinking, relying on the state, was still the sporting logic of the planned economy, which is not a healthy way to develop. It has been tried in the years since, and in the end it came to nothing.

I cannot imagine how a man who cared as much as he did got through those days when nothing could be salvaged. In his place I might well have become depressed.

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. We seemed to have seen something, and yet we seemed to have seen nothing at all. It was like a match struck in the dark. We saw a single point of light, without knowing whether what lay between here and there was a level road or a winding ditch.

In the preface to one of the match reports by stoneman, the well-known StarCraft match-report writer, I found a passage that moved me deeply. I have copied it out here as the closing words of the second chapter.

stoneman: My old friend Saint once asked me online whether I would make a living from games for the rest of my life. I said that I had once made a living from games, that I had lived that life. But it is a living you can only make while you are young, and nobody can make it for a lifetime. Once a person's experience and age reach a certain point, they naturally stop working in this line. In my life as it is now, games are more like an art. I lose myself in them, but I am not in thrall to them.