Chapter 11. A Woman in Esports: Xiaocang

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 十一 女电竞人小苍

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 27, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19624769

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 stage and behind it, the esports scene is divided into many different jobs: player, coach, team leader, manager, owner, caster, host, journalist, editor, media buyer, planner, event organiser and so on. Most people only ever experience one of them, and some experience several. Xiaocang is one of the very few who have been through almost all of them. Along the way she kept trying and kept learning, surpassing herself one step at a time until she reached the dream she had set for herself.

A lucky first meeting with games

Xiaocang first played StarCraft in 2000, during her second year of senior high. It was her brother who introduced her to it, and he can hardly have imagined that his casual gesture would become the first link in a chain of butterfly effects.

At the start she was drawn only by the pretty graphics and the novelty of the game, but losing to the computer again and again woke the stubbornness that years of sport had built into her. She went looking for CBI, the games section of the newspaper Computer Business Information, which carried a wealth of StarCraft match reports. She studied technique there, worked through examples, and finally beat the computer with a five-drone zergling rush. Most players know the satisfaction of beating the computer for the first time after a long effort.

Gradually the boys in her class began to notice this "girl who plays StarCraft", and the crowd that ran to the internet café after school gained one more member in a red jacket. According to Xiaocang, one lad in that crowd looked a little like the Hong Kong singer Leo Ku and played rather well. She teamed up with him against their classmates, two against four, a pairing good enough to be called the legendary duo of the school. As for whether anything else went on between the two of them, she only smiled and said nothing.

Later Xiaocang found her way to BN, Blizzard's Battle.net. She still remembers vividly how excited, thrilled and curious she was the first time she logged in. Host created, opponent joined, start, fight, finish. She lost, which surprised nobody, but the experience felt entirely new. Facing a stranger for the first time planted the seed of an esports dream in her.

Her favourite race was the Zerg, which have two defining qualities: speed and numbers. Whichever of the two carried a game, winning it brought a rush of swagger, a feeling that nobody could stand against her. It was at this stage that Xiaocang's talent for the game began to show. Real ability, diligent practice and the fact that she was a girl soon gave her a certain local reputation.

One day she played a particularly satisfying series in an internet café against another StarCraft player, a proper battle for both of them. He came straight over to introduce himself, and because the school uniform she happened to be wearing that day made her look like a boy from behind, he greeted her with a huge bear hug. When she turned round timidly, his face went green. This careless lad went by Adidas and was then captain of the Hunan StarCraft team. Xiaocang joined the team, and the seed of her esports dream began to sprout.

In 2008 I made a documentary profile called Esports Life: The Story of Xiaocang. After the shoot I told a colleague that Xiaocang would go far one day. He asked me why. I said that I saw a drive in her. She is a Pusher, someone who will keep pushing herself forward.

Where does a quality like that come from? For that we have to go back to her childhood.

A child of the galaxy

Xiaocang, whose real name is Zhang Xiangling, was born in Changsha, Hunan Province, on August 3, 1984. Her father was a track and field coach, so from very early on her life was bound up with long-distance running, the long jump, taekwondo and other sports. That gave her a body that could take punishment, and it forged a stubborn, resilient character that refused to lose.

Her father was extremely demanding in that training. During one 400 metre hurdles session Xiaocang struck her tailbone against a hurdle, but her father still insisted that she finish the rest of the distance, and she had to endure severe pain to complete the session. There are many stories like that one, and perhaps it is precisely because there are so many of them that they shaped the character, or you might say the fate, that Xiaocang would later have.

Her family was not well off. They lived on a dirt hill on the outskirts of Changsha, and the conditions of her childhood were fairly ordinary. Most of her free time as a small child went on play and on training. I remember that some photographs of Xiaocang as a girl used to circulate online, a round-faced child holding a guitar, her arms and legs already solid.

She got the first personal computer of her life in junior high, a reward from her family for an excellent set of midterm results. The maximum score on the academic subjects was 730 at the time, and Xiaocang scored 731 overall: 711 on the academic subjects plus 20 bonus points as a sports specialist. Her family were delighted and asked what reward she wanted. Her answer astonished her parents. A little girl asked for a computer, a machine that was far from common then, and the price of 4,999 yuan certainly made them wince, but they let her have her wish, and from then on Xiaocang came into contact with computer games.

The games she met in those early years were mostly RPGs: Princess Maker 2, the Might and Magic series, Heroes of Might and Magic II, The Legend of Sword and Fairy, Septerra Core and others. That left her with a lasting fondness for the genre. An RPG, she says, lets a player experience a completely different life, throw themselves into a brand new world, become someone else and do things that are unimaginable in ordinary life. Every time she finished one, it felt like living through a whole lifetime. In 2012 she played a single-player title called To the Moon and was so moved by its story that she devoted a special episode of her video column Game Life to it.

At that stage Xiaocang loved games so much, and put so many hours into them, that her schoolwork suffered. In one mathematics examination marked out of 150 she scored only 40, which startled the parents and teachers who were used to her doing well. Teachers started calling her in for "heart to heart" talks, and her family began applying pressure. It was a wretched time for her, because Xiaocang knew what her family circumstances were. If she did badly at school, she might never turn her life around, and that heavy burden sat on her shoulders the whole time. Fortunately her father was a reasonable man who understood that guiding is better than blocking. He struck a deal with her: she could play games as long as her marks stayed at the agreed level, and the moment they slipped below it she had to stop at once and get back to studying.

The Warcraft era, from player to caster

Xiaocang had known about Warcraft for a long time, but she was still a StarCraft loyalist and resisted the new game for a while, until the people around her switched one after another and she finally took it up properly herself. Her favourite race was the Orcs, an army of solid, powerful troops, thick-skinned and far from weak on the attack. Whatever she chose seemed to reveal the same forceful side of her.

In 2003, in her third year at university, she happened to see a piece of Warcraft III news reporting that a woman player called Colorgirl had beaten a man in competition. Xiaocang admired her enormously. She found Colorgirl online at once and joined her team, JH, and with that she formally entered the esports scene. Later she played for the women's team Faith, for WarcraftDream in Harbin, for Level99 and for others. In those teams Xiaocang realised the dream she had formed years earlier, and the shoot she had once carried in her heart grew strong.

Women's divisions were extremely rare in the early days of esports competition, so from the moment Xiaocang set out on that road she was usually facing men. In her very first official tournament she even drew Ma Tianyuan, the WCG StarCraft 2v2 world champion. Unfortunately, in an age before anyone had worked out mutalisk hit-and-run micro, Ma Tianyuan knocked her straight out with a three-hatchery zergling and suicide strategy that hardly anyone had seen before.

The Warcraft III era was harsher still, because the wider environment for esports had improved and there were more professional players. Xiaocang had realised her dream of turning professional, but beating every man on the field to take a tournament title was like forcing herself to catch a rainbow. It was simply not realistic.

Without results, her standard of living did not really improve either. Her parents were getting older, she was no longer young herself, and thinking about the future often left her in painful indecision and struggle.

In 2005 Xiaocang entered a casting competition run by the web portal TOM. The winner would go to South Korea to cast WEG live on site. It was her first attempt at casting an esports event, and to her own surprise she won. Going to South Korea and feeling the thunderous atmosphere of a Korean esports venue left a deep impression on her. After she came back, the invitations to cast suddenly multiplied, and Xiaocang appeared at CEG, ESWC, PGL, WCG and many other large events at home and abroad. It looked like a bright and glamorous road, but in her heart she still wanted to go back to being a professional player.

In 2006 Xiaocang found a residential compound in Beijing with a good connection, where Battle.net ran far more smoothly than elsewhere. The rent there was 1,500 yuan a month, a very high outlay for someone fresh out of university, but she gritted her teeth and took it in order to make herself better. Then she looked for every way she could to earn extra money. What she did most in this period was work as a journalist, writing articles.

In March 2007 Xiaocang was invited to join the Gamebank esports channel as a professional esports caster. Her live casting at PGL and WC3L was so well received that a group of fans online began calling themselves cangshu, the Chinese word for hamster and a pun on her name. Her casting skill and style kept growing with practice, until she settled into a manner of her own, professional and passionate, which won recognition from more and more esports fans.

Buying a house for my parents

In 2008 Xiaocang's years of effort brought some return. First, she joined Level99 and became a genuine professional player. Second, a local Changsha newspaper nominated her as an Olympic torchbearer. Lifting the Olympic flame, a symbol of ambition and dreams, in front of the people of her home town brought her family enormous honour and gave Xiaocang, who cares deeply about her family, a great sense of fulfilment. At the end of that interview I asked her: you have already achieved your dream, so what is the next one? Xiaocang said she wanted to buy her mother and father a house. It was a big dream, she said, but she was working towards it.

Five years slipped by. In those five years we mostly ran into each other in a hurry at competition venues, exchanged greetings and never had a chance to sit down and talk. Some readers may already know the earlier part of this story, but I suspect many do not know what came next.

At the end of 2008 Xiaocang took out a mortgage and bought her parents a flat in Changsha, which made her father's journey to work easier. For the deposit she put in the 30,000 yuan first prize she had won at the Ironlady tournament, together with everything she had saved from appearances elsewhere, making up 100,000 yuan in all. Another dream had come true, but the pressure of the repayments came with it, and after so many years of freelance life Xiaocang now had to think about finding a stable job.

A new campaign, League of Legends

In 2009, on a friend's recommendation, Xiaocang tried League of Legends on the North American server. She thought straight away that it was an excellent game and liked it a great deal, so she looked up which Chinese company held the licence for it and found that it was Tencent. She asked a friend to submit her CV and applied for the post of brand manager for League of Legends. Looking back now, you have to admire her eye and her decisiveness.

Because she had years of working experience in esports, Xiaocang got into the League of Legends group in the marketing department. The project group had only two people at the time: Xiaocang, responsible for brand building, and Bobi, now the head of Tencent's TGA, responsible for marketing the game.

One episode, Xiaocang says, left a deep mark on her: the first time she took a Chinese team to an international League of Legends event. The game had not yet been promoted in China and there were few players to begin with, yet she still had to find a roster, so they held an open selection among the strong players they knew. A squad assembled at the last minute was behind foreign teams both in understanding of the game and in mechanical skill, and they lost without any suspense. The result had been expected, but for a girl with a competitor's heart it was no small thing. She resolved to promote the game in China no matter what, so that more players would enter the world of League of Legends, the overall standard would rise, and Chinese teams could beat strong foreign opponents in future competition.

Xiaocang's advantage as a video caster was that she had come to League of Legends early on the North American server and had been a professional player herself, so she understood the game more deeply than most Chinese players of that period. She started making casting videos. This was not part of her job at all. It was purely a hobby of hers, and the videos contained nothing commercial. From the second half of 2010 until she resigned in March 2012, the enormous view counts brought her a great sense of achievement, but they also took away her free time completely. Xiaocang says she did not even have time to date. The frantic pace of video production on top of her work at the company left her in very poor physical shape. Once, in a taxi, the driver watched her in the rear-view mirror for a while and then told her she badly needed a nourishing soup.

By early 2012 Xiaocang felt her body had reached its limit. Partly to keep her health from affecting her work, and partly because she had seen casters doing well with Taobao shops, which showed that the esports market was maturing and its channels diversifying, she resigned from Tencent and took a bold shot at a different way of living.

At the end of 2012, out of her personal love of games and her commitment to the idea of a women's team, Xiaocang and her friends turned LOL Ladies into an offline club. It began very well. They had a two-storey flat for living and training, a group of high-spirited players and coaches, and quiet support from many former Tencent colleagues and friends in the scene. To let the players concentrate on training and put in the full hours, Xiaocang turned down a great deal of outside sponsorship and paid appearance work. But several tournaments went badly. The girls also had complications of their own, and the pressure from boyfriends and from families was severe. The whole group was young, and their lack of experience in management and coordination began to show. The atmosphere at the base grew heavier and heavier. Xiaocang asked herself why she had wanted to run a women's club at all. One reason was to complete a dream of her own. The other, and more important, was to build a platform, a stage where those "younger versions of herself" could show what they were capable of and be spared a few detours. But if things went the other way, if the dream could not be realised and she was dragging everyone down instead, what was left for that stubborn persistence to stand on? After painful reflection Xiaocang dissolved the club. Her mood stayed fairly bleak for a long time afterwards, but she did not stop moving in esports, and she recorded more casting videos.

In a recent episode of the Hubei Satellite Television programme Who Is My Family, Xiaocang's father and uncles all offered comments on her casting style. Whether they measured her against the professionalism of Han Qiaosheng or the passion of Huang Jianxiang, both famous Chinese sports commentators, her style always carries the audience's emotions along with it. What really matters here, I think, is something else: her particular faith in games.

I asked Xiaocang what made her start making casting videos in the first place. She said she had not thought about it much at the beginning. She simply wanted to show people what was good about a game, hoping that more of them would agree, take part, feel how enjoyable it was and see the care its makers had put into it. Later she realised that she was rather good at it, and she wanted to explain some of the technical material so that players could improve faster. She knew that as her work and her life grew busier she could no longer put the enormous hours into her own play that she had as a professional, and that she would inevitably drop out of the top tier, but that did not affect her persistence. The subjects of her videos moved from beginners' guides to improving play, then to explanations of advanced technique, and then towards simply bringing people more enjoyment. Her video content has kept changing as the game itself has aged.

Everything should come back to user value, Xiaocang says. Only by correctly identifying and analysing what users need, and then meeting those needs, can a product be accepted by users. That is the most valuable lesson she took away from her time at Tencent.

Free from doubt, then standing firm

Confucius said that a man stands firm at thirty and is free from doubt at forty. I have always believed that the reversed version of that saying, free from doubt first and standing firm afterwards, is the correct one. At eleven at night on September 8, 2013, having just come off nearly ten hours of live broadcasting from the Chinese qualifiers for the League of Legends Season 3 world championship, Xiaocang went back to her hotel, took off her makeup and rushed straight out again, and we talked for another three hours at an outdoor café in Xintiandi, Shanghai.

She said the results of her medical check-up had just come back: mild hypertension, high blood lipids, mild arteriosclerosis and a good many other problems. Most of them were mild, but together they showed a body in poor health. People burn their lives to realise their dreams, she said, and esports people burn their health as a catalyst on top of that. "In my life so far I have always known exactly what I wanted. I took it one step at a time and reached those goals. But nothing is gained without something else being lost, and only now, looking back, do I see what I really missed. At work I was severe and demanding. In a match I was fixed on winning. When I lost in a game I showed colleagues and friends an ugly side of myself. When people showed concern for me I was distant and cold. Perhaps I have always been determined to hold on to something, but when I open my hands I find there is nothing in them."

Perhaps it was the day's work, perhaps it was the check-up report, but the impression she gave me that night was of someone tired.

When she talked about her business, her Taobao shop and her video content, the phrase she used most often was "user needs". It may be a result of her working experience. Almost everything she is doing now is derived from user needs, and there is not much "I think" or "I feel" in that derivation. Instead she turns the question over and over. In the situation as it stands, what are users still missing? Or what do they need that they have not yet noticed themselves? She did not tell me much more detail, which only made me more curious about what she will do next.

Not long ago Xiaocang finished the Beijing Marathon, and in the photographs she looks considerably healthier and brighter. She told me that she has now hired someone to run her company with full authority, and that new company procedures are gradually being put in place. Free of the daily clutter of running a business, she has more time of her own again. The first priority is exercise, keeping her body healthy and her mind in good order, and she has apparently found a good-looking personal trainer in Shenzhen. After that period of reflection Xiaocang no longer wastes energy on fields that do not interest her. She is settling down instead to make better video programmes and to bring better content to her fans and to the players of League of Legends.

Life really is a matter of making one choice after another, and building one balance after another.

I believe that in the days ahead this Xiaocang, a little less wilful and headstrong and a little more mature and thoughtful, will bring us one new surprise after another inside the balance she has chosen.

Xiaocang, a woman in esports.