Chapter 9. Haitao and 2009: A Collision of Destinies

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 九 海涛和2009的宿命撞击

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 25, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19622500

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.

On June 18, 1986, Zhou Lingxiang, the well-known Dota caster who goes by Haitao, was born in Jiujiang, Jiangxi. Nine months later, on March 23, 1987, Wu Sheng, the Dota world champion who goes by 2009, was born in Yuncheng, Shanxi. It is as if fate had decided to make the era a livelier place.

Haitao is a former colleague of mine from GamesTV, and 2009 is a current colleague at the WE club. I worked with each of them for a long time. Both of them cast Dota now, and both run successful Taobao shops, yet I have always thought of them as two completely different people. Until I interviewed Haitao, I had no intention of writing about them together.

But the deeper the interviews went, the more interesting things I found in the way the two of them grew up, some of it shared and much of it directly opposed. Putting them side by side may help us understand that their earth-shaking quarrel of 2011, the one fans called the Tao-9 war, was not a simple clash of words, and that it stood for more than the two men themselves. It was a collision of destinies between two entirely different mindsets raised in today's Chinese society.

Haitao was born into a family that was not well off. His father was a manager at a catering services company in Jiujiang. The pay was low, but he was easy-going and open-hearted, with plenty of friends. Sadly, Haitao's parents divorced when he was nine, and he lived with his father. Haitao did not say why they divorced, only that at the time he badly wanted them back together. That began nearly six years of shuttling between the two of them, trying to talk each one round. They did finally reconcile when he was fifteen and starting senior high school, but the experience left Haitao, then only in his third year of primary school, extremely independent and mature for his age.

Wu Sheng, known as 2009, was born into a reasonably comfortable family in Shanxi. A few years ago the whole family moved to Xi'an, and once, when we were there on a business trip, his mother drove out to the airport to collect us. She was warm and shrewd in conversation. While 2009 and I were doing a campus tour together, he mentioned his father, who appeared to be a senior executive (he was not very clear about it and I did not press him at the time) and was also a very traditional, strict father. Most of us know that the traditional Chinese father and son relationship tends to involve a certain unsmiling contest of wills, and combined with the older generation's deep-rooted suspicion of "computer games", that meant 2009 inevitably ran into his father's opposition when he first turned professional at Dota. Stubborn by nature, he held out on his own and refused to concede, while his mother smoothed things over between them and secretly sent him money so that he could keep himself fed and hold on to his dream. Many people may not know that the money 2009 first used to keep a team running all came from his mother in secret.

On this point I want to say something in defence of 2009 and of esports people generally. Many people see only what they gained later, and not the pressure and risk they carried at the start, giving without asking for anything in return. That is unfair.

In terms of the families they were born into, there was a certain gap between 2009 and Haitao. What they had in common was that both, for various reasons, became highly independent. With Haitao it came from a father who was so tolerant. With 2009, when he moved up to senior high school in 2002, his family transferred him to Shanghai Yucai High School, making him a gaokao migrant, a student relocated to another province to sit the national college entrance examination on better terms. A fifteen-year-old boy with no relatives to turn to began studying far from home, and he still went on to enter Zhejiang University with a high score in 2005. That took strong self-control and a genuinely independent mind.

At around the same time, Haitao's good standard Mandarin got him into his high school broadcasting room. What is interesting is that nobody in his family spoke Mandarin. His accent-free Mandarin was entirely self-taught, an unusual outcome that grew out of a hobby other people found hard to believe: Haitao had loved watching the news since he was small. He liked the fast pace of those programmes and the many new things they showed him from the outside world. Imitating news anchors as a child laid the foundation of the casting and presenting style he has today.

Look only at how they grew up through secondary school and the two are already completely different. Haitao looks like a well-behaved child in the traditional sense, while 2009 is more like a fierce, sharp-eyed shark. I am sure you have noticed the entirely different family attitudes at work here, some of it deliberate and some of it not. By the time they reached university, their outlooks had drifted further apart still.

In 2004, Haitao passed the entrance examination for the law department of Shaoguan University. His reason for choosing law was simple. He thought he had a quick tongue and might make a decent lawyer. He later discovered that law does not run on a quick tongue, which left him at a loss for a while. Choosing student societies in his first year, he applied to a great many of them while deliberately avoiding the university broadcasting station. But you cannot escape what is meant for you. At a society speaking event, the head of the broadcasting station was sitting in the audience, liked what he saw, and pulled Haitao into the station after all. It was in that university broadcasting station that Haitao met Zhao Jia, then a colleague and now his wife, which makes it a match of nearly ten years.

Perhaps because of his parents' divorce in childhood, Haitao places great importance on family, and several of the big decisions of his life have had to do with his family. We will come to those. For now, back to 2009.

In 2005, Wu Sheng was admitted to Zhejiang University to study biomedicine. The most important thing about university for 2009 was that he could finally do what he wanted to do. From what I have seen, his character is all or nothing. He could take O2Jam, the rhythm game his ex-girlfriend liked, all the way to the "inhuman" level, the highest of the game's four grades of newcomer, intermediate, advanced and inhuman, simply because she liked it. And because he liked it himself, he could train the mid lane in Dota until nobody in the world could touch him.

2009 came to Dota in his second year, joined avnc, a team made up of Zhejiang University students, in his third year, then joined Ehome in 2008 and won the ACG Asian Championship held in Singapore. All of it looks as though it came to him naturally, and yet behind it lay that refusal to lose and that determination to see a thing through, which was the key reason he could push past every obstacle. Remember this side of his character. It will help you understand what happened later.

After starting university in 2004, Haitao also carried on with Warcraft III, which he had loved since high school. After StarsWar 2 in early 2006, GamesTV's golden Warcraft III casting pair of BBC and Lao Yang entered their most popular period, and Haitao watched their broadcasts on GamesTV every day. He had none of 2009's obsessiveness about it, though. Haitao went on with an unremarkable routine of classes, games and radio programmes.

Then, one day in 2007, the GamesTV website launched a casting video competition called Bo Tian Bo Di, roughly "casting the heavens and the earth". The entry page not only set out a detailed tutorial on how to make a game casting video, it also advertised a prize that Haitao found very appealing. The winner would get a free trip to Shanghai and would cast a Warcraft III match alongside BBC and Lao Yang. Haitao was tempted, so he found a friend with a camcorder to help him record a video and did his first piece of on-camera casting. That entry took first place, and Haitao got his trip to Shanghai.

Haitao's video caught the attention not only of GamesTV's leaders, Chen Jianshu and Yaomo, but even of PLU's boss, Friend. Friend very much wanted Haitao at PLU, but Chen Jianshu would not let him go. Fortunately GamesTV and PLU were strategic partners at the time, so the whole thing stayed a minor episode.

After the Shanghai trip, Haitao thought about it briefly and decided to join GamesTV as an intern. The allowance was only 500 yuan, and he had no relatives in Shanghai, but he went to his university tutors anyway, took leave, promised to come back for his examinations on time and to keep his grades up, said goodbye to his family and his girlfriend, and came to Shanghai.

The years from 2007 to 2009, interning at GamesTV, were genuinely painful and happy at once for Haitao. He lived in a shared flat in a residential compound next to Daning International in Zhabei District, fourteen people in a three-bedroom flat, 280 yuan a month for a small partitioned cubicle with no internet and no spare space, just enough to hold a person. The snoring next door often kept him awake at night, which is how he came to need earplugs and an eye mask to fall asleep, a habit he still cannot break.

Yet as his colleague at the time, my impression of him in those days is of a man who always had a smile on his face. Every day he rode his bicycle through wind and rain, and whatever programme needed a voice-over or an appearance on camera, he was willing to do it the moment anyone asked. He worked hard to seize every chance to learn and train himself, and he never once haggled over what he would get back. Once, when BBC was away on a trip, Haitao covered his presenting slot and did thirteen hours of live broadcast back to back. Everyone at GamesTV liked this hard-working colleague and often took him out for meals, because we all knew that apart from his allowance and the lunch the company provided each day he had no other income. Xiaorong117 and BBC always looked after him like a younger brother, and Haitao is grateful to this day.

Haitao says those two years at GamesTV were hard but happy, because he could do what he loved doing.

So do not envy the success they had later. Before you curse them, ask yourself whether you could really give the way they did, without asking what you would get back.

Unfortunately, the global financial crisis of 2009 forced GamesTV to contract and restructure, and on Chen Jianshu's advice Haitao went to PLU, which was then based in Wuxi.

PLU had moved to a thinly populated new district in Wuxi by then, but it had already started selling mechanical keyboards and making browser games of its own. On this point I have to say that I greatly admire PLU's CEO, Chen Qidong, known as Friend. After all those setbacks, he did not lean on outsiders. He led a dozen or so people and survived stubbornly on the edge of a cliff, boldly trying every one of the newest ways of "monetising your own attention", and he has kept at it until it finally bore fruit. That tells you the PLU team really is very good.

It was in a team like that that Haitao began his second stretch of learning. He was responsible for two programmes, Game Tuesday, made in partnership with Youku's games channel, and Dota All-Star Night. This was also the period when he first engaged with Dota properly. Before that he had treated it only as light entertainment.

Just then, Zhao Jia, the university girlfriend who had waited quietly for Haitao back home for years, began to grow anxious. She had always supported his work, but youth waits for nobody. Marriage or a break-up? The practical question was finally in front of him, and Haitao chose family without hesitation and decided to go home and get married. He gave up the Dota programmes he had only just started, went back home, and became a news anchor at a local radio station on a salary of just 2,000 yuan.

Haitao was fortunate. He married Zhao Jia, a woman willing to wait all those years who did not mind that he had nothing at the time. They bought only one wedding ring. His family paid the deposit on a flat, and the couple paid the mortgage themselves, which is now cleared. Everything was very simple. Haitao and Zhao Jia married in June 2010. He had a home now, but he was not happy in his work. After moving from news anchor to reporter he found there was a great deal he wanted to do and a great deal he wanted to say, while a radio station operating inside the system came with even more restrictions. He was thoroughly frustrated.

So from October 2010 he worked as a reporter while making Dota casting videos in his spare time. At first the idea was only that he could not let the hobby go and wanted to work off his frustration, but once he started he could not stop. Every day he took Dota replays from Replays.net, Sgamer and U9 and cast them. With the experience he had gained at GamesTV and PLU, his clear Mandarin and the solid presenting fundamentals of many years, he quickly stood out in a Dota casting scene that was still far from crowded.

And 2010 happened to be the third year after Dota took off in China in 2007. That year was Dota's star-making period. The game had spread over the previous few years, carried into Chinese universities from abroad by Chinese students studying overseas, and professional Dota players were now being put in front of enthusiasts through one tournament after another. All that stood between them and a place on the altar was the final push from the media.

Haitao caught that wave at exactly the right moment. His fairly orthodox television commentator's image brought the Dota scene of the day a style of casting that every side found easy to accept, and he immediately won the affection and the enthusiasm of large numbers of Dota players.

In the middle of 2011, a social networking site approached Haitao about advertising in his videos and asked him to take part in some interactive activities on the site. The fee was 6,000 yuan. It was Haitao's first income of that kind, and he remembers it very clearly. It made him realise that casting videos was a workable path, so he resigned on the spot from the radio job that had frustrated him so much and threw himself completely into casting videos and looking after his audience.

Haitao was very conservative in the way he explored making money after that. He had no Taobao shop before November 1, 2011. Until then his thinking about revenue was still stuck on placing advertisements for other people. The group-buying concept was taking off around the same time, and Haitao had noticed on one hand that his audience's demand for Dota merchandise kept rising, and on the other hand he wanted to show manufacturers the enormous commercial value of esports.

So Haitao approached Xu Ke, the owner of TEE7, and began discussing a group-buying arrangement for Dota-themed clothing. They would settle on a product, and any customer who mentioned Haitao's name would get a discount. After several rounds of this, Xu Ke found that TEE7's clothing sales had risen noticeably, so he began advertising in Haitao's videos. Later, seeing that Jiafeiyan and BBC had opened Taobao shops of their own, Haitao opened his own as an experiment on November 1, 2011. TEE7 remained the main line of goods, and although the range was narrow, sales as far as I knew had already reached 300,000 yuan a month. That was already far more than many top-tier professional esports players were earning.

Haitao was not the first person in esports to open a Taobao shop, but his success made many people in the scene who had been stuck in their ways realise that this was a route that could genuinely make them rich, and that they could get there through their own effort. It did not need much capital or a large team. As long as you cast well, looked after your audience and drew enough attention, you could turn that attention into money directly, and everybody involved was happy. It was a business that could be sustained for a long time.

Now let us look at what 2009 was doing over the same period.

After winning ACG in 2008, Wu Sheng announced his retirement and went back to finish his degree. In August 2009 he founded the FTD team, short for For The Dream, and returned to the battlefield. The team put up some results over the following year and picked up dual sponsorship from Lao Gan Die (LGD) and Shengguang Tianyi (SGTY), but as management problems multiplied and the poaching wars driven by wealthy second-generation owners began, 2009 started thinking about stepping away.

In August 2010, Wu Sheng formally announced his retirement, ending his career as a professional player. He began casting in November of the same year, and on November 6, 2011 he opened his own Taobao shop.

Haitao and 2009 both have businesses of a settled size now, but the way they run them shows a great many differences of character.

To this day Haitao has only four customer service staff, and his goods are all shipped directly by the manufacturers. After opening his Taobao shop, 2009 not only invested heavily in garment printing machinery but also hired more than fifty customer service and packing staff. His business now covers clothing, food, ornaments, browser games and much else.

Remember what I said about 2009's character?

All or nothing. That is 2009. There is nothing approving or disapproving in that. Living a life of calm and stability and living a life of storms are simply two choices, and neither is right or wrong. So the so-called Tao-9 dispute between Haitao and 2009 in 2011 was, in the end, only a collision between two views of life. Their completely different ideas were formed by all the factors and all the years that shaped them growing up, which meant neither could ever persuade the other or change him. And when they finally understood that a difference of outlook does not matter much in the greater scheme of things, they made their peace and let it go. That is why they cast a live match together for the first time at StarsWar 7 in 2012.

In 2012, Haitao grew tired of the business negotiations he had never enjoyed. He stopped all the advertising in his videos and went back to GamesTV to make programmes with his old colleagues. 2009 expanded his business, rented two floors in Hangzhou and set up a company of his own.

There you have it. That is life. You simply make the choices you like.

The story is told. It is time to close.

Looking back from where we stand today, the environment for Chinese esports people began to improve in the period after 2010. Reviewing the wider background of the time, several points are worth noting.

1. Here comes my theory about the rise and fall of esports titles again. Dota was created abroad long before, but in China its translation into Chinese and its spread took a long time, and it only properly took off in 2007. By 2010 and 2011 it had reached the peak of its third and fourth years. Dota's stars began taking their place on the altar, and attention on casters and tournaments alike rose to its highest point. Many of the esports people in front of the camera caught a good moment. By the fifth year, 2012, Dota began to decline, and after the middle of that year the decline accelerated. League of Legends began to rise, and Dota's golden age was over. All of that, of course, came later.

2. On December 8, 2010, Youku formally listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the United States. Before 2010, games were not Youku's strength but Tudou's. After the listing, Youku began pushing hard on every front, and as its bandwidth and its user experience improved, large numbers of Dota casters moved from Tudou to Youku. That became the basis of Youku's comeback in games. The Youku games channel was also clever enough to put together, during that period, a casters' alliance with a real share of the proceeds attached, which helped many newcomers to casting. In the broader sense, that was a good thing.

3. After 2010, university students, an important part of China's esports audience, were generally around twenty years old and born in the 1990s. They had more spending power than the generation born in the 1980s and were far more accepting of games. That was an opening created by the times.

I regard the end of 2011 as a milestone for Chinese esports. Esports finally came down to earth and found a road that suited it. It stopped chasing large, insubstantial manufacturer sponsorships and stopped pinning its hopes on state support or on wealthy second-generation owners throwing money at it. It finally began to face the reality of Chinese esports honestly, to see clearly what it was capable of, to stop asking others for help, and to walk the steady road of "monetising your own attention".

Only once you can sell things on the strength of your own reputation can you talk about endorsing products and helping other people sell theirs. Only once we can help others make money will others be willing to advertise with us and raise their sponsorship fees. It is a very simple principle, and yet Chinese esports stumbled down the wrong road for more than ten years.

Haitao, 2009 and many other esports people of that time were an important part of that milestone. I am setting down your stories, and I am proud of you.