Chapter 15. The Esports Millionaire Who Came Out of the Slums: Meng Yang

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 十五 贫民窟走出的电竞百万富翁 孟阳

First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 5, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19630299

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on July 31, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Meng Yang was born on January 29, 1983, in the poorest and roughest shantytown in Dongcheng District, Chengdu. He was still twenty-one years away from standing on the Great Wall and winning a one million yuan prize at an esports tournament.

If you think that is already a low place to start a story, you are wrong.

When Meng Yang was ten, his father was sentenced to life imprisonment for a criminal offence. His mother had a very low white blood cell count, fainted often, and could not do heavy work. The family's economic support had collapsed. Yet compared with that, the social discrimination that followed was the real torment.

Can you imagine what it is like for a boy barely into his teens to be called "the murderer's son" by his own teachers at school? To be told in front of everyone, "Your father is a murderer, so you will be one too"? Reading this, I cannot help asking what exactly went wrong with our education. Why would a teacher say such a thing? Young Meng Yang could never work out why people believed in "like father, like son." Why?

The teachers tormented him, and so did the other students. Every day Meng Yang had to walk the same stretch of road to school and back. The road was not long, but he says it was the longest part of his day, because classmates would be there too, pointing and whispering. That did lasting damage to his character. From an early age he stopped wanting to be around other people. He became withdrawn, and even the games he chose to like were the ones you play alone. But he was not a boy who accepted his lot, and somewhere inside him there was still a small hope: that someone would notice him.

Growing up in conditions that harsh, Meng Yang could easily have gone to extremes. There was indeed a period when he hated his teachers and his school. He did not act on it. Part of it was that he wanted a normal life, and part of it was that he had a mother to look after. So he became like a hedgehog, wrapping his soft and sensitive core in a thousand sharp spines to frighten off anyone who might hurt him. Only that way could he keep from dwelling on accusations he could not begin to understand, and keep from resenting a society that had shown him little kindness.

Meng Yang says he loves Stephen Chow's films, because the optimism of the little characters in them made him envious.

Envious, because at the time he could not manage it himself.

In 1997, after the first half of his second year of junior high, the fourteen-year-old Meng Yang dropped out of school.

He and his mother then ran a small video screening room together. It was some distance from home, and every day he cycled there through wind and rain to boil water, brew tea, and bring in customers. Admission was one yuan a person, and takings ran to about fifty yuan a day.

He was still seven years away from the million yuan prize. Nobody cared who he was. His dreams? His anger? All of it was pinned down by fate, with no sign of a way out. It is hard to imagine what his life would have become without esports, without Quake.

Fortunately, fate did bring him to esports, by a very strange route.

One day in April 1997, Meng Yang's mother gave him six yuan in pocket money. Normally she gave him five, and for whatever reason that day she gave him one more. As usual he set off for the computer room nearby, an early form of the internet café, to pass the time with a few games. When he got there, the whole neighbourhood had lost power and the place was shut. Disappointed, he stopped at a newsstand on the way back to see whether it had any magazines about computer hardware, which had always interested him. He picked up a copy of Home Computers and Consoles. It cost six yuan. He bought it.

That issue carried an article about Quake II. Meng Yang had been fond of another shooter, Delta Force, so he kept reading. What caught his attention was a line saying that in Quake II you had to keep jumping while you fought. That was a revelation to him, that a game could be played in a way so far removed from reality, and he wanted to try it. As luck would have it, the computer room he frequented had the game installed. It had in fact been sitting on those machines for a long time, but he had never recognised the icon and so had never opened it.

That was how Meng Yang's Quake II journey began. It is worth noting that the hardware in the computer room was poor, so he had to shrink the game window down to roughly the size of a mobile phone screen to play at all. Only people from that era can really appreciate what that was like.

In the Quake II years, everyone was still just messing around, but Meng Yang's level of play drew a lot of attention from the players around him. Between 1998 and 1999 there were more than twenty clan servers running Quake II, and he challenged every one of them. Hardware and bandwidth being what they were, the strongest team he ever faced was USF, based in Hong Kong.

On October 1, 1999, the 1.07 test build of Quake III was released. The owner of Meng Yang's regular computer room was a local police officer who loved games. He had the connections to obtain Quake III and install it on the machines right away.

Meng Yang's era began there.

Compared with Quake II, Quake III was simpler to control and looked much better, and its weapon balance was so well judged that even after many later updates the weapon parameters were never changed.

The lower barrier to entry and the steadily improving hardware brought in many new players, and Quake III attracted far more attention than Quake II had. Larger tournaments began to appear, and so did a few stars. At this point Meng Yang was still an unknown Quake III enthusiast.

Meanwhile, through 1999 and 2000, things at home kept getting worse. The video hall was long gone and income came and went. At seventeen, Meng Yang had no other options and no way out. Fate was forcing him onto a new road, one that could change his life.

In March 2000 he entered a Quake III tournament in Chengdu. The entry fee was five yuan. What stayed with him was how many of the scene's top Quake III players turned up, including several members of DOC, a well-known Chinese team at the time. Meng Yang was not intimidated. Early in his match against the famous Netboy he was twelve frags behind, and he not only clawed the deficit back but finished with twice his opponent's score. Riding that momentum, he beat another strong player, gameboy, twenty to nothing, and then beat Butcher, later the well-known coach of Evil|SF in the Counter-Strike era. He lost only to Deng He, the one player he would ever call his teacher, and took second place.

That tournament gave Meng Yang his confidence. He began to realise that this might actually be a path: the path of esports.

In August 2000, China's first CPL qualifier, organised by the Beijing company Huacai and sponsored by ChinaRen, was held in Beijing. The event was led by Maverick, whose real name is Yan Ying. He ran the well-known Quake III site Q3ACN.com, was known in the scene as Old Ma, and served at the time as technical director of Huacai Software.

Because of the way CPL qualification worked, foreign players came to compete for those slots, so the top two places went to foreigners. Meng Yang finished fourth. Third was CHJ, who would be his friend and his principal rival for many years to come.

There is a curious detail here. That CPL qualifier and that year's WCGC, the World Cyber Games Challenge that preceded the WCG, were held in the same building at the Pacific Computer City, and on the same day. So once Meng Yang was finished with CPL, he went up to the eighth floor to play WCGC.

The WCG's global standing today needs no explanation from me, but few people know much about WCGC, its trial run. There are good reasons for that. There were still very few channels dedicated to covering esports. Specialist media had not yet emerged and the major portals were not interested, so events at the time were small. The Chinese WCGC qualifier, for instance, had only eight computers on site and very few entrants. In Quake III the handful of players who signed up all knew each other and knew exactly where they stood, so they simply did not play. Everyone agreed to send Gameboy and Butcher to South Korea instead, since they had the most tournament experience.

That year's WCGC produced a famous farce. LakermaN, the Swedish professional who finished second in Quake III, said, "Chinese people can use computers?" That remark had a profound and lasting effect on Chinese esports.

Nobody now knows the context in which he said it, or whether the story grew in the telling. Either way, it enraged every player in China. The young Meng Yang and CHJ were furious too, and resolved to beat him. Beating him meant far more practice, which meant taking the professional path, and that led them to rethink their lives and act on it. One other person was equally enraged by that line, and it hardened his resolve to professionalise esports teams: Pei Le, known as KinG, then captain of the Lion team and later the founder of WE.

With professionalisation in mind, Meng Yang accepted an invitation from Old Ma after WCGC and moved to Beijing in 2001 to join Huacai as a professional player. A word about the company: its full name was Beijing Tianxia Huacai Network Software, the Chinese subsidiary of the Taiwanese Huacai Group, and it worked in publishing. That may not mean much on its own, but you will certainly know this: it was the company that brought Delta Force: Land Warrior and King of Kings to China.

Before long it was time for the 2001 WCG qualifier, and it was brutal. The very first match drew Meng Yang against CHJ. After six months of professional training the two of them had become the top Quake III players in China, and seeing them collide that early stunned everyone. The qualifier was single elimination, which meant half a year of hard training came down to this one match.

A friend later recalled that day to Meng Yang. The whole hall was so quiet that nobody dared make a sound. Close as we are, he said, I did not dare come over and talk to you, because when the two of you were playing there was murder in your eyes.

Everyone knew what that year meant, so even in the opening match they held nothing back. The quality of the play and the ferocity of the fight made it a classic that people would bring up for years afterwards. In the end Meng Yang won a match decided by the narrowest of margins. CHJ, who had never imagined his dream would end so early, was devastated. Meng Yang then swept through the rest of the field to take the Chinese Quake III title and travel to South Korea representing China, along with Evil|SF, that year's Counter-Strike qualifiers.

Unfortunately, the gap between Chinese esports and the rest of the world was enormous. Take Counter-Strike: several of the maps played at WCG had never been used in Chinese tournaments, and the teams had never practised them. With so little competitive experience and so thin an industry behind them, good results were never likely. That is why, after the 2001 WCG, China saw a wave of effort to bring its tournament rules in line with international standards. From that moment on, Chinese esports finally emerged from its chaotic phase, at every level, and found a direction.

For the 2002 WCG, after another year of hard training, Meng Yang entered two events, Quake III and Unreal Tournament. He took the Chinese title as he had hoped. The runner-up who also earned a trip to South Korea was Fan Zhibo, who flew back from Russia specifically to compete, and who may be more familiar to you by his other name, Jibo.

Meng Yang turned nineteen that year. Two years of professional training had brought him to a small peak in form, and he had begun to develop a systematic understanding of Quake III and a style of his own.

He had noticed a rule: when a player makes too many inputs, mistakes follow.

Some will say that is a very simple statement. It is. Most tactical ideas that actually work are simple, like Chairman Mao's "Fight when you can win, run when you cannot."

Working from that idea, Meng Yang shifted from an aggressive style to a defensive one, reasoning that an attacker makes more inputs than a defender and is therefore more likely to make a mistake.

Before that WCG, studying how European players approached the game, he had found that they focused on macro control of the whole arena. They knew exactly where every resource on the map was and when it respawned, and they knew which routes to take so that an opponent would still find nothing after respawning. It is like billiards: after you pot the red, where you leave the cue ball determines how well you can run the table, and if you cannot pot, you at least leave your opponent with nothing. That is macro control of a match.

Drawing on what others did and combining it with his own thinking, Meng Yang arrived at a style he called "playing cautiously and shadowing," following his opponent like a ghost without ever revealing his own position.

The approach produced real results. He worked his way through the WCG bracket and, in his final match, missed with two shots and lost to Socrates of the United States, finishing fourth in the world in Quake III in 2002. It remains the best result any Chinese player has achieved in the game.

After 2002, with Quake III past its golden age and new games arriving constantly, and above all with Counter-Strike, which asked less of a player's mechanics and forgave more mistakes, spreading everywhere, Quake III shrank into a small, high-level niche.

Through tournaments large and small, Meng Yang had earned somewhere over twenty thousand yuan by the end of 2002. That does not sound like much, but in an era with so few tournaments it was a lot of money, and his prize winnings were feeding his whole family. As Quake III faded and events dried up, however, he was pushed back to the bottom. At his poorest, he and his mother had forty yuan between them. With no other choice, Meng Yang even sold his computer and took a job at a state-owned enterprise to support the family. The work held no interest for him.

His trip to ESWC in France in 2003 was also a failure. He puts it down to his own arrogance and to not analysing each opponent objectively, and he went out in the round of sixteen. CCTV5 had sent a crew to the venue in France. One of the camera operators said to him afterwards, you are carrying too much pressure. After you lost that last match, you turned around and saw the camera pointing at you, and even though you were clearly in pain you smiled and waved. Watching that through the lens hurt me. If it hurts, you do not have to put yourself through it.

Those words are a fair picture of that low period in his life.

In 2004 things turned. Perfect, whose real name is Jiang Ke and who had practised Quake III with Meng Yang throughout and later became a core member of the famous Counter-Strike team Evil, told him that Shanghai was putting together a professional esports club. That club became 5E.

Meng Yang arrived in Shanghai on June 13, 2004. The day he had started at Huacai in Beijing in 2001 was also June 13. Make of that what you will. 5E paid him 3,600 yuan, a high salary at the time, and the club's roster was star-studded. Its head, Liu Xing, came from finance and was notably effective at raising money, securing investment from a major shareholder in the Lenovo Group.

So why did 5E vanish almost as soon as it appeared?

Two reasons are usually given. First, poor results, including losses in several important matches. Second, an occasion when the team overslept and forfeited its place in a tournament.

Those two things convinced the investors that the team had no discipline, and the sponsorship was withdrawn. 5E lasted six months before it disbanded. In the end Liu Xing sold the whole squad to the Beijing team Hunter.

As you can see, the development of Chinese esports has been anything but smooth. There have been many attempts, and the saddest part is how many of the mistakes never needed to happen. That is why I am writing this book: I hope Chinese esports can accumulate something, grow up, and take fewer wrong turns.

The failure of 5E is not really the point here. The point is that in July 2004 Liu Xing told Meng Yang there was a tournament in Beijing with a one million US dollar prize. Meng Yang did not believe it, because Chinese events at the time were nowhere near that scale.

A month later, in Beijing, he confirmed that the tournament was real. It was organised by the Taiwanese computer hardware company Abit and was called the Abit Fatal1ty Great Wall DOOM 3 Million Challenge. The game was DOOM 3, made by id Software, the same studio behind Quake III, and very similar to it. The prize turned out to be one million yuan rather than dollars, though even today that would be an extraordinary sum.

Meng Yang had never played DOOM 3, so he went looking for a copy in a hurry. He eventually got a legitimate one from Deng Peizhi, one of NVIDIA's chief engineers, and tried it on a top-specification machine, only to find that the game demanded a great deal of the hardware. He could not worry about that. There was very little time left to practise.

Nobody rated his chances beforehand, since everyone knew how little time he had spent with the game. Meng Yang was worried too, but the prize was so tempting that he had to try.

Fatal1ty, though, seemed even more nervous. He had chosen the maps well in advance, and before the tournament proper he demanded that Meng Yang not be allowed to watch his matches against other players and stay at least two hundred metres away. Meng Yang accepted.

After aZhe, whose real name is Zhang Zhe and who was another of China's top Quake III players, lost to Fatal1ty six to nine, he had a clear sense of Fatal1ty's level. When Meng Yang returned from two hundred metres away, aZhe told him: "If you can't beat him, I'll twist my own head off and hand it to you."

Meng Yang later said the match itself was not exciting at all. He raced to a score of twenty-five to two.

That was because he had prepared thoroughly. He had dug out his own old Quake III demos and gone back over the mistakes he had made in them, and he had settled on a strict plan for the match: take total control of the resources in the game and go for them even at the cost of giving up a kill in front of him, so that his opponent could never pick up a weapon to fight back with. Hence the one-sided result.

There were more than 140 journalists in the hall, Meng Yang said, and even he had not expected a scoreline like that after fifteen minutes, so he eased off and conceded a few frags. In his own words: "They were our international guests, after all. No need to make it that bloody. It would not have looked good."

It was a fairly comfortable match, but afterwards people claimed that Meng Yang had bought Fatal1ty off and that the American had thrown it. Meng Yang said he had no way to answer the claim and no need to. At the CPL Winter tournament in Dallas on December 22, 2004, he then beat Nomadic, the best player in the United States, and Germany's dragon, the best in Europe. He won US$9,000 and a DOOM 3 world championship that carried real weight. It was the first individual world title in Chinese esports, and his play answered the doubters.

Plenty of people also said that Abit never paid the million. Meng Yang has several interesting things to say about that.

First, the prize money arrived a week after the tournament. He had given the organisers his mother's account, so he phoned and asked her to check it. She came back and told him the first digit was an 8 and after that all she could see was a lot of zeros. After 20 percent personal income tax, the prize came to 800,000 yuan.

Second, Abit did initially feel the million had been an unwelcome surprise, since the company had never expected Fatal1ty to lose. Then coverage arrived from all over the world and it realised the million had been money extremely well spent. The Chengdu Commercial Daily, which had a large local circulation, devoted its entire A2 page to Meng Yang's million-yuan prize, and no brand could have bought that kind of exposure for one million yuan.

Third, the club took 120,000 yuan of the prize. Meng Yang gave 70,000 to aZhe, who had practised with him throughout, and put 10,000 in a red envelope for Perfect, who had introduced him to 5E in the first place. He then set aside another 10,000 to improve life for his teammates at the Hunter club. That is who Meng Yang is: he takes loyalty to his brothers very seriously.

Fourth, with what was left, in January 2005 he spent 500,000 yuan on two flats in Chengdu, and in 2007 the demolition of the family's old home brought another one. The flats he bought at 2,100 yuan per square metre are now worth 13,000. His mother can live on the rent she collects at home every month, and after everything, mother and son finally have a settled life.

Fifth, after winning the Great Wall Million Challenge and the CPL Winter tournament, Meng Yang wanted to spur Chinese players on, so in interview after interview he said he trained twelve hours a day. He says now that this was a white lie: in reality he trained about five hours a day, sometimes less. The consequences were remarkable. PJ, the StarCraft player he shared a flat with, went from practising one hour a day to six, and when Sky of WE heard about it he greatly increased his own training hours too. That is why the editor-in-chief of Electronic Sports magazine later called him the spiritual leader of Chinese esports.

In 2005 Meng Yang returned to Beijing and went back to the life of travelling to tournaments and winning prize money, earning something like another 300,000 yuan over time. By 2007 he had decided that a player's form falls away sharply after twenty-five, so he stopped competing at once and moved into other things. During that period Min, the head of Razer, approached him and offered US$1,500 a month to test new Razer products, and he accepted. He also ran a website and sold wine, following his own interests wherever they led.

On March 15, 2007, Meng Yang joined World Elite to lead its FPS side. He had been on good terms with KinG, Sky, and the other WE founders since 2004, and they had often given each other important support and help.

He later found that games were still where his instincts lay, and joined a Russian company where his old Quake III comrade Jibo worked, handling game import and export. At the time of writing, Meng Yang had joined Tencent and was still working on game imports, drawing on his experience and instincts to advise the company on its decisions.

If you do not give up on life, life will not give up on you.

Meng Yang, the esports millionaire who came out of the slums.