Chapter 3. The Reinvention of Esports News Sites

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 三 电子竞技新闻网站的革新

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 16, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19614594

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.

Most of China's long-established esports organisations, and most of the individuals in them, have media in their DNA.

Take EHOME, the most popular team of the early Dota era, whose Chinese name was Yijia. They came out of the esports website Esai, and Esai's predecessor was Ccsk.net, the well known Chinese Counter-Strike site that started up in Chengdu in 2000.

When CCSK moved to Beijing in 2003, several of its key members broke away and went to Haofang in Shanghai, where they built CGA, the China Game Alliance website. From 2004 onwards, the behind-the-scenes side of Chinese esports settled into a pattern: Esai in the north, CGA in the south.

A few years after Shanda acquired CGA, several of those same key members broke away again and followed Li Lijun, the original investor behind Haofang, to found the company Qifan.

Once Qifan was up and running, several key members struck out on their own once more and built the 11 gaming platform. Which is to say that the behind-the-scenes world of Chinese esports is not really very big. Turn it over however you like, and the people charging ahead are the same crowd who once ran esports news media.

All of that came later, though. Back to the main story: why did media become the earliest form the esports scene took behind the scenes?

That is easy enough to understand. The full arrival of network technology in 1998 brought together the kids who had until then each ruled their own arcade or internet café, and with StarCraft and Counter-Strike both pushing in the same direction, match report sites and game bulletin boards became the earliest prototype of Chinese esports media. Where people gather, organisation follows. From spontaneous chatter on forums to actual commercial organisations, esports had a long road to travel.

Around 1999, when getting online was still not particularly convenient, early esports media still appeared in traditional form. Computer News and CBI Computer Business Information had powerful distribution networks and a firm hold on China's second-tier and third-tier cities and the smaller places beyond them. Plenty of people learned how to log on to battle.net from those newspapers. Hanyuliang and the other match report writers who were active in CBI Computer Business Information are still fondly remembered by many esports fans.

Because early StarCraft had no replay system, what caught on first on the websites was still the written match report. Among the better known were the site run by JOJO of the TS team, the site of the =A.G= team from Sichuan, the site of the LION team, then known as LION.KinG and today as WE.KinG, the China Yaoyuan StarCraft replay download site, and CSA, the China StarCraft Alliance site.

The hottest StarCraft bulletin board was 8DA. The forum was set up by Bada Computer in Chongqing, and anyone who spent time on it will remember 8da.BOAT, and 8da.ZK, the captain of the 8DA team, China's first semi-professional team.

The 8DA board took off because Chongqing was running a local semi-professional StarCraft league that drew in a great many of China's best StarCraft players and teams at the time. Controversy, arguments, chat, idle posting and the beautiful women of Chongqing, which was a very important reason, plus the fact that there were nothing like as many ways to talk to each other as there are now, all combined to make the 8DA forum one of the liveliest and most concentrated places in Chinese esports.

In that era, though, the growth of behind-the-scenes esports organisations was mostly confined to their own localities, and esports media were still held back by all sorts of practical constraints. So the whole thing remained at the primitive bulletin board stage of chatting, arguing and trading rumours.

The transformation of Counter-Strike media

After 2001, Counter-Strike began to overtake StarCraft as the mainstream esports title in China, because it was easy to pick up and gave players a strong sense of being part of a team. Counter-Strike media took the baton from StarCraft media and began the next stage of development.

CSchina and its founder, Shangdi Pian'ai Bubing

Shangdi Pian'ai Bubing, or God Favours the Infantry, whose real name is Li Xiang and who now works at Sohu's Changyou, single-handedly founded one of the most important websites in the history of Chinese Counter-Strike. Look closely at the domain name: it has china in the middle. A domain like that could only be registered in the earliest days of the Chinese internet, and in an age when search engines were still undeveloped, a domain that was easy to remember and stated plainly what the site was about mattered enormously. What could state it more clearly than the combination of CS and China?

CSchina carried on the general layout of the StarCraft, Delta Force and Quake sites that had come before it, built mainly around match reports and a forum.

CSchina appeared at exactly the right moment. Counter-Strike had spread widely between 1999 and 2000, and demand for match reports and news about Counter-Strike competition was growing. The habit of reading match reports while playing a game was already established, and there were plenty of Counter-Strike match report writers, but they were scattered. So the moment CSchina appeared, its forum drew a great many writers from China and abroad.

The country where Counter-Strike was strongest at the time was Germany. Counter-Strike rewards discipline and teamwork, and the German talent for both was unmatched.

An aside here. A lot of esports titles go through a chaotic, half-understood phase when they first take off, because nobody is familiar with them yet. The Germans, though, are always the first to work out a systematic way to play, and they become the leaders. That is a talent that comes out of a habit of thinking. As time passes and people start to understand a game, players in Europe and North America move ahead, because they enjoy digging into strategy and tactics, their thinking ranges more widely, and they develop all sorts of creative approaches rather than staying as rigid as the Germans. After that the Koreans move ahead, because they take strategy and tactics seriously and also pay attention to fine mechanics, unlike the rougher European and North American style. In the end it is always China and South Korea fighting over first place, because the Chinese capacity to learn is simply extraordinary.

Helped by good timing and a good position, and by the CSchina Invitational, CSchina had already become China's biggest Counter-Strike site by around 2000. Every major Chinese team took pride in having its own forum section on CSchina.

In today's language, CSchina was the golden boy of Chinese esports websites. It had gathered a large body of match report writers, and alongside written reports it published demos, or replays, of famous European and North American Counter-Strike matches and teams.

By comparison, Ccsk.net at the same time was a nobody. It had launched later than CSchina, it had fewer match reports and fewer replays, and its site and forum looked just like CSchina's. However you looked at it, it had no chance.

And yet it was CCSK that carried out a major reform of esports media, one that had a profound influence on the whole behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports.

That reform was a network of local correspondent stations spread across the country.

CSchina did not do official news coverage. In the early days, news management on CSchina was fairly open: anyone could write a piece and submit it, and once an administrator approved it, it appeared on the front page.

Or to put it another way, in that period the words news coverage, to most kids, carried the flavour of Xinwen Lianbo, the state television evening news, a long way from esports and from playing games. The people working in esports then were half-grown children who found writing a school essay painful, let alone a news report.

In 2001, CCSK saw clearly that players would inevitably come to want this, and set up an official news desk, pulling together enthusiasts who could write and who had an eye for news from the forums of both CSchina and CCSK itself. That was the period when I joined CCSK.

CCSK redesigned the layout of the site, moved the news section to a prominent position at the top centre, improved the news back end, and enforced strict standards of formatting and presentation inside the news team.

People notice that I still pay close attention to paragraph breaks, blank lines and reading comfort when I write online. All of that was trained into me back then.

Do not underestimate these things that look ordinary today. At the time they were a major change. Before that, esports news coverage was barely different from a forum post. There was no punctuation and no formatting, often a great block of text crammed together and decorated to death.

In 2001, the core of that correspondent team was about 15 people, split into a domestic news group and an international news group. The previous head of the news team was mad, whose handle was Beigao Shangangye. He was Sichuanese and male, but he wore his hair long over his shoulders and spoke gently, and he was a demanding editor. If he had not been married, I would have gone on wondering about his sexual orientation. He was the one who plucked me out of the forums, he is the man who led me into the esports industry, and I am grateful to him to this day.

The next head of the news team was Xiaopang, whose real name is Wang Qiang. He was a determined newsman with real personal magnetism, and he led a group of Counter-Strike fans studying overseas who steadily translated foreign Counter-Strike news and tournament coverage into nourishment for Chinese Counter-Strike.

CCSK also attracted a lot of people who are now major figures. One example is ttdz, the developer of Weico Pro, an app many people use today. He produced the Chinese localisation of Counter-Strike, he was in CCSK's international news group at the time, and he was on good personal terms with the founders of several European esports websites.

While CCSK was building out its correspondent network, CSchina stayed where it was. Talking to people in the industry later, I came to suspect this was because CSchina was not Shangdi Pian'ai Bubing's main line of work at the time, so he did not have the energy for deep reform. I did track him down, but he was very busy at work and it was the Lunar New Year, so he has still not replied to my interview request. That is a pity. I will come back and fill this part in once I have more.

It was at that moment that CCSK got its chance, although the chance itself was not a good thing. This was the famous 2002 incident in which the Evil | Zero 26space team was stripped of its place at the WCG world finals in South Korea.

Put simply, the affair grew out of bad feeling between the team and its sponsor over the division of prize money. Before WCG, 26space had won an ADSL Cup event in Shanghai worth 30,000 yuan, and the owner said the prize money would be held back for the moment and that they should go to Beijing first for the WCG China national final.

So the players travelled overnight to Beijing for WCG and ended up winning the WCG China title and its 40,000 yuan prize. Once they had the WCG money, the players talked it over, decided the owner had not treated them well, and agreed to give up the 30,000 yuan and leave the 26space club with the 40,000. The owner was furious and told WCG's Shanghai organiser that some of the players were underage. Under the rules, the 26space team lost its place at the WCG world finals in South Korea.

The affair shook Chinese-speaking esports communities everywhere. People poured into the CSchina forum to denounce it and split into two camps, one saying the players were in the wrong and the other saying the owner had ignored the bigger picture. Conspiracy theories of every kind appeared. I have talked to both sides about what actually happened, and it is complicated. It is not the subject of this piece, so I will not go into it here. I will say only one thing: afterwards, everyone came to agree on one point, which is that both sides came out of it damaged.

In 2002 it really was true that every teenager in China was playing Counter-Strike. China finally had a team everyone recognised as strong, and it was going to South Korea to fight for national pride for the first time. The level of attention was comparable to the Olympics. Faced with that flood of angry players, the CSchina forum soon went down, so everyone moved across to the CCSK forum to carry on the argument. After half a month of it, people noticed with some surprise that CCSK had slowed down but held.

Which brings me to CCSK's technical manager at the time, Xingxing, whose real name is Guo Zhuo. He later became head of operations at CGA and then assistant to the president at Qifan. He is a man obsessed with technology. Before that incident he had already argued that the forum was the key part of a website, and he had cut back on food to save the money for the core files needed to upgrade it. With people like that at CCSK, how could it not take off? So when I heard he had gone to work on the 11 platform, I knew a major change in platform technology was coming.

Back to the main thread. After the Evil | Zero 26space affair, large numbers of players stayed on at CCSK, and at the same time the advantages of the local correspondent stations began to show. CCSK could always be first on the scene to report on the big events. There was foreign news, and the stars from your own city appeared on the same site as the stars from abroad. That did a great deal for the self-image of a lot of kids at the time. More and more people wanted to appear on CCSK, and more and more tournaments wanted CCSK to cover them. That virtuous circle eventually produced an enormous chain reaction and made CCSK a symbol of the Counter-Strike era.

Every esports website after CCSK took news coverage and its bulletin board seriously, and through the Counter-Strike, Warcraft III and Dota eras alike, setting up local correspondent stations became something people simply did as a matter of course.

A great deal of esports talent entered the scene through those correspondent stations and gradually moved from covering events to organising and running them. Many others left esports for the wider games industry. Ten years on, many of the editors and reporters of the esports scene back then are spread across every level of the Chinese games business, forming a distinctive web of relationships. I believe that one day these people are bound to come together again and produce something remarkable.

Below I have attached a piece I wrote about CCSK in 2004, which gives a more detailed picture of that period.

The people in the piece:

Laomeng: real name Zheng Hongmao, former head of CCSK's external affairs group, in charge of CCSK's commercial negotiations, now general manager of Esai.

DDM: real name Wang Yang, former head of CCSK's internal affairs group, in charge of CCSK's internal organisation, now a senior manager at Esai.

Baobao: real name Yang Chen, former head of CCSK's external liaison group, now a member of the marketing department at Haofang. Baobao was his childhood name, and since this is a memoir, I think it is better to use it.

ddjack: real name Zhang Ran, CCSK's first site director, who left CCSK for personal reasons after the WCG China final at the end of 2001 and joined Haofang Technology in October 2002. He now works in Haofang Technology's marketing department.

Xingxing: real name Guo Zhuo, former head of CCSK's programming group, responsible for server maintenance and back end programming, now head of operations at CGA.

Qiu: real name Du Qiu, former head of CCSK's programming group after Xingxing left CCSK, now head of technology at the Esai website.

ice: real name Zheng Bin, former head of CCSK's correspondent group, in charge of domestic event coverage and commentary, now an administrative staff member at Esai.

mad: real name Yang Bo, online handle Beigao Shangangye, CCSK's second head of news after Jiutian. He brought in many of CCSK's main members, including Baobao and Qiu, and later had to give up his work at CCSK because of his own job.

Xiaopang: real name Wang Qiang. On the strength of his work he took over from mad as CCSK's third head of news after mad stepped back, in charge of international event coverage, news translation and commentary. He is now in Beijing.

Why was CCSK called CCSK?

Even now, a lot of people have no idea which words the name CCSK abbreviates, because the letters are hard to explain from either pinyin or English. I remember asking people inside CCSK, while I was still working there, what CCSK stood for and what the name actually meant. Most of them could not give a reason. Baobao in particular answered the question in five characters: it has no meaning.

There were plenty of guesses at the time about what the name meant, but most people could not pin down which word the k came from. A year later I finally found the correct answer in an interview with ddjack. It turned out that CCSK stood for China Counter-Strike Killer. DDM, Laomeng and ddjack settled on it after a night of discussion, and ddjack says he was the one who made the final call. There is no need for us to check that, but he probably never imagined that the name CCSK would go on to be known around the world.

What came before CCSK?

CCSK's predecessor was DFCN, the China Delta Force Alliance. Laomeng, DDM and mad had known each other since the end of 1998. Laomeng was captain of =V=, DDM was captain of =LD=, one of the biggest teams in the country, and mad was vice captain of NC, a famous team of the Delta Force period. All of these teams were well known in the Delta Force years. In mid-1999 the old Delta Force alliance fell apart, leaving several hundred Delta Force teams across the country without a leader, so DDM pulled Laomeng in and the two of them built a new alliance, DFCN. They began organising a national Delta Force league and established real authority in the Chinese Delta Force scene.

At that point ddjack and mad joined DFCN, the China Delta Force Alliance. Baobao was working on Ultima Online then and had not yet had any contact with Laomeng's group. But in early 2000 the same thing began to descend on the games they each loved: the rise of cheats. Every game has a natural lifespan, but cheating undoubtedly aged Ultima Online faster, and it destroyed Delta Force as well. Nobody could do anything about the frenzy of cheating at the time, and the technical staff could not bring it under control, so large numbers of Ultima Online and Delta Force players were forced to give up the games they loved.

Just when everyone badly needed a game with a fair, clean environment, Counter-Strike appeared. Counter-Strike's timing was very good, you could say. With relatively few cheats around in its early days, people began turning their attention to this new game. Many professional Delta Force players moved to Counter-Strike, among them professional Counter-Strike players people know well today, such as OY. And it was at this moment that the core members of DFCN came into contact with Counter-Strike and were struck by the intensity of the game and the richness of its visuals.

At that point the only Chinese Counter-Strike sites were the Half-Life site run by 21 Shiji Paigu and Shangdi Pian'ai Bubing's Xingyun Counter-Strike site. Many DFCN supporters started asking DFCN to switch to Counter-Strike so that their demand for Counter-Strike news could be met, and so the switch became the natural thing to do. From then on DDM, Laomeng, ddjack and the others spent every night studying the details of Counter-Strike, and they gave the new website a name: www.Ccsk.net. The domain was DDM's personal property.

Why did ddjack, CCSK's first site director, leave as soon as the site was built?

Most people have no memory of the name ddjack, because his time at CCSK was short. The person who should have been running CCSK was Laomeng, but the Delta Force league was not over yet and he genuinely could not free up the time for CCSK, so DDM brought in ddjack, one of the members of DFCN, the China Delta Force Alliance, to build the CCSK site. You could say that in those days ddjack was the whole of CCSK, handling everything from the technology and the graphic design to updating the pages. Later Jiutian, also a DFCN member, was sent over to update the news and became CCSK's first head of news. Between them they kept the CCSK site running in its earliest days.

Then, around May 2000, the Delta Force league ended and Laomeng, DDM and the other former Delta Force site members abandoned DFCN entirely and threw themselves into CCSK. At that point ddjack left CCSK for personal reasons. When I asked him in the interview why he left, he said, a little embarrassed, that it was because of his girlfriend. He kept neglecting her for the website, she was very unhappy about it, and he had to give CCSK up. He lived quietly after that, until he joined Haofang Technology in October 2002. ddjack is the person known today as Shisanzhang in CGA's marketing department, and as CGA_CiCi on the CGA forum.

What was CCSK like at the start?

Bleak would not be too strong a word for the early CCSK. Everything was missing. From page and news updates to technical maintenance, from operating funds to somewhere to put the servers, it was basically all ddjack, on his own. The web server was supported by ACEP and DC of CPGL, two names the old hands of the StarCraft scene will know. The application and database servers were borrowed by ddjack from the local telecom bureau through personal connections, in exchange for building them web pages and setting up game servers. On that count ddjack rendered great service in getting the Ccsk website off the ground, and Laomeng speaks highly of his work.

As DFCN's transformation gradually completed, more and more members joined the early CCSK. Jiutian, mad, Xiaopang and Qiu all became mainstays of the site one after another. The difficulties of those early days are hard to imagine. CCSK's traffic then was nothing next to CSchina's: publish a news item and a few hundred people might read it. There was no money to get started, no reputation with which to sell advertising, and not enough people to run tournaments. It was essentially a vicious circle. If CCSK wanted to grow it had to break out of that circle, and the key to breaking out came down to one thing, which was money. To have more money to grow with, the early members of CCSK went short on food and clothing.

Yang Chen, fighting through the days when passion burned

In 2001, before he joined CCSK, Yang Chen set up the U-Tian work group with Xiaosanshao, CAT[AOQ], ddjack, Maoshua and others, all of them well known in the games industry today. Their Ultima Online server had been doing well in the online games world of the time, and the potential of the Chinese online games market was enormous. Legend of Mir had not yet arrived in China, so they wanted to build further on what they had. But perhaps they really did lack a sense of how to invest, or perhaps they were just a little short of luck, or perhaps the environment for online games in China genuinely was not mature yet. Whatever the reason, their efforts came to nothing in the end. They were left downcast, but not defeated.

You can see it in what Sanshao wrote at the time: there is anger at the environment, criticism of the standard of behaviour among players, frustration at how deeply entrenched conventional attitudes were, and disappointment at the way the state was blocking things off on every side. What we can see is how serious they were. They were doing the work seriously and they hoped to build something. But in the end the external and internal conditions did not come together at the right moment, and the U-Tian work group broke up.

Sanshao and Yang Chen both started new lives in a mood of disappointment. One of them became, at 19, the youngest online games marketing manager in China. The other went to CCSK and set off down the esports road with Laomeng and Xingxing without a backward glance.

In mid-2001, on ddjack's introduction, Yang Chen, who was then studying in Beijing, joined CCSK and worked alongside Laomeng and Xingxing in the city. From CCSK correspondent to head of the correspondent group, Yang Chen fought for his own dream alongside his colleagues through those burning years. When I interviewed him later and he looked back on that time, the happiness in his voice was strong enough that I could picture him smiling in front of his screen right through QQ. Yang Chen is a very emotional man, and although the hot-tempered, impatient Baobao of those days is gone, every time he goes back over the past with me I can feel how moved he is.

One story in particular. In 2001 the first investor CCSK had dealt with suddenly pulled out. The company owed everyone about two months of wages and there was nothing they could do about it. To save money they moved into a basement. Laomeng put up 2,000 yuan, and at that point they had no idea where they would go or what they would do once that 2,000 yuan was gone. Yang Chen told me that he felt lost then, unsure whether to carry on or to walk away.

Xingxing went hungry for the forum

Speaking of going without food brings me to a man who played a crucial part in CCSK's rise: Xingxing, former head of CCSK's technical group. As people know, much of CCSK's later success was down to its forum. The forum built a huge Counter-Strike community culture, reaching 250,000 registered users and a peak of 2,900 concurrent users, though all of that came later. In the beginning, thanks to ddjack's connections, the forum server and the news ran for a time on a telecom server in Huaibei. Then, through Xingxing's efforts, that data was moved onto the server Xingxing ran for Ultima Online, where it stayed until that Ultima Online server was shut down at the end of 2002.

The original forum could only support 200 people. To let it handle a growing number of registrations, Xingxing strongly recommended replacing CCSK's forum software, and lobbied everywhere about the enormous benefit the change would bring to CCSK's traffic. But buying forum software cost money, which was difficult for a CCSK with very little income.

So, to prove that his decision was the right one, Xingxing began eating less to save money. Following his lead, Baobao and Laomeng started doing the same. For a long stretch nobody ate meat. For members who were out chasing sponsors and advertising and running tournaments in CCSK's early days, that was a thorough test of both physical condition and mental resolve.

Who helped CCSK most in the early days from outside CCSK?

When I put that question to the people I interviewed, besides thanking the players for their enthusiasm and their own team for its selflessness, they all mentioned two people: ACEP and DC of CPGL. These were two pioneers who had been working in esports since the StarCraft era, and they played a crucial part in CCSK's development. That part was not only the important help with the web server in CCSK's early days, but a kind of help that came close to faith.

Laomeng singled out ACEP in his thanks. He said: "From him I gained a much clearer understanding of the industry. I did not agree with everything he did or thought, but I can say that it was under his influence that I came to see our DFCN, and later CCSK, as a new industry with a broad future." It was exactly that far-sighted view that shaped CCSK's later direction and hardened a faith that Laomeng and the others still carry today.

Baobao singled out DC in his thanks. He said: "WCG 2001 was when I met DC. DC is a very odd man. He is an absolute pioneer of Chinese esports, but very few people know about him, and everyone who does know about him respects him a great deal. After WCG 2001, DC left Chinese esports. He turned up at WCG in 2002 as an invited guest, but he left again very quickly. He is someone I look up to enormously." DC is now a postgraduate student.

That interview was the first time I had ever heard Baobao say he looked up to anyone, so I feel a still deeper respect for DC, an esports elder who did not leave behind so much as a single photograph of his face. That is why I went to the trouble of finding a picture in which DC had been caught quite by accident, cropped out a close-up of him, and placed it here, in thanks for his lasting influence on the people of Chinese esports.

The forum overhaul of 2002 was a milestone in CCSK's history. It marked the decline of CSchina and the rise of CCSK.

By 2002, Xingxing had used the money he had saved to buy the forum software, the blue and white forum people saw at the time. That forum could still only support 200 concurrent users, and its development had not been finished. So over the following month Xingxing kept working through the forum's bugs. In early 2002 the average concurrent user count was 1,000, and with the second WCG under way, forum registrations and concurrent users climbed steadily. During this period came the affair in which the ICE team in the Hangzhou regional was affected by shady dealing, and the concurrent user count quickly rose to 2,000.

In the later stages of WCG, CCSK's correspondent group ran a best news reporter award on the forum, and then came the affair nobody has ever forgotten, in which Evil | Zero lost their place in South Korea after winning the WCG 2002 China national title. Because CCSK tracked and reported the story promptly, concurrent users on the CCSK forum shot up from 2,000 to 3,500. Through it all, Xingxing spent a solid week upgrading and patching the forum to keep it stable.

You could say the forum played an enormous part at the most critical moment in CCSK's development. At the same time, CSchina's forum was shut down because it could not carry the load, and many former CSchina forum members moved over to the CCSK forum. That laid a solid foundation for CCSK's community culture, and CSchina began steadily losing its supporters from then on. So the forum overhaul of 2002 was a milestone in CCSK's history. It marked the decline of CSchina and the rise of CCSK.