Chapter 16. A Print Magazine With Worries: Electronic Sports

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 十六 忧虑的平媒《电子竞技》

First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 6, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19631175

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.

Plenty of people know Electronic Sports magazine, and many of them probably read it while they were at school. Yet as the only central-level esports magazine in China approved by the General Administration of Press and Publication, its turbulent behind-the-scenes story over the past decade has stayed hidden.

Someone will ask straight away: the first issue of Electronic Sports only came out in April 2005, so why talk about a decade?

That is the first story in this chapter.

Back in 2003, Li Xian and Qi Shuyan, two veteran publishers in their forties, had already founded several successful IT and digital technology magazines. Both were experienced media hands, and Qi Shuyan belonged to the first cohort to graduate in communications from Tsinghua University after the Cultural Revolution.

2003 and 2004 were also the hottest years Chinese esports had seen. Drawing on instincts built up over many years in the trade, Li Xian and Qi Shuyan recognised the enormous demand among esports enthusiasts for specialist content, and set about applying for a publication licence.

Electronic Sports was not the magazine's original name.

The first name they chose was China Electronic Sports World. Naming a publication is a delicate business, though, and the name can decide a title's fate outright, so Li Xian went to Chai Shumin, a senior figure in publishing whom he treated as a mentor, hoping for some advice. Chai knew nothing about esports at the time, but he knew magazines. After listening to Li Xian describe the content and the positioning, he thought for a moment and said: why not trim off both ends and simply call it Electronic Sports?

So in 2004 a magazine with a simple, clear and dignified name went into print. Electronic Sports was supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology, sponsored by the China Science and Technology Journalism Society, and published by the Science and Technology and Life magazine house. It filled a gap in the Chinese magazine market of the day, and for the first time esports held a clearly defined place of its own in traditional media.

With the licence approved, recruiting became the first priority. Li Xian and Qi Shuyan did not play games themselves, and the first group they hired, in 2004, were all reporters from traditional media: professional, but with no understanding of esports. After putting out a trial issue they realised the fit was wrong. So in early 2005 they worked their contacts until they found DouDou, who would become the magazine's marketing director.

Why DouDou? To explain that, we have to start with how poorly China's public network and its education network connected to each other.

In 2004 DouDou was still a university student in Beijing and a fanatical Counter-Strike player. Matches between the education network and China Netcom lagged badly, so to solve the problem he went to a friend who worked in the network room at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and, through that connection, set up a Counter-Strike server on the academy's backbone network. As many readers will know, the China Science and Technology Network (CSTNET), one of China's four modern backbone networks, grew out of NCFC, which the Chinese Academy of Sciences had built, and NCFC was the earliest internet infrastructure in the country. The result was a server that was fast for players on the education network and on China Netcom alike.

Before that, DouDou and Niuyan, a fellow reporter at the esports site Esai (previously Ccsk.net), had founded the Beijing University E-sports Union (BJUEU), and in 2004 they began organising the first Beijing College Cyber Tournament (BCCT). Counter-Strike was hugely popular on campus at the time and universities played each other constantly, but they were not all on the same network, and servers that ran smoothly between the education network and the public internet were rare. DouDou's server therefore became the gathering place for Beijing's student esports crowd.

It was while running that tournament that DouDou met He Qiu, then captain of the Central University of Finance and Economics team and later the first executive editor-in-chief of Electronic Sports magazine.

Earlier still, another student tournament had introduced DouDou to Tsinghua University's U team, one of the best known Counter-Strike sides on the Chinese university circuit. They got on well, and DouDou eventually became U's team manager. The captain of Tsinghua U at that point was Fu Weihua, known as Dragoon, who would go on to be deputy executive editor-in-chief of Electronic Sports.

Fu Weihua is something of a legend. He had real pull at Tsinghua. He led the U team into repeated showdowns with Peking University's SIN and other rivals, and he took U to national tournaments, turning it into the standard bearer for Chinese university esports. After graduating in finance from Tsinghua, though, he faded out of the scene and put everything into his career. He is now a fuchu-grade official, roughly a deputy division head, at one of China's banks. That is what makes clever people formidable: they know what to do and when to do it.

Another member of the U team went by OGC. He became the second executive editor-in-chief, after He Qiu left the magazine.

Put like that, it is probably clear why Li Xian went looking for DouDou in the first place.

In February 2005 the team was complete, and Electronic Sports was founded in the China National Publications Import and Export Corporation building at Chaoyangmenwai in Beijing. The editorial office had ten people in total, counting editors, designers and distribution staff, and seven of them lived together in a two-bedroom flat next to the office. Life in that shared flat was hard but very happy. Everyone was doing work they loved, and they could gather every day to brainstorm feature ideas.

The first issue appeared in April 2005 and was extremely well received. Advertising arrived in the second month, whereas the received wisdom in publishing is that a magazine normally waits eighteen months for its first advertiser. At the newsstands around the Eight Colleges area in Haidian, Beijing, the magazine went on sale on the fifteenth of the month and was sold out by the sixteenth. Everything was moving in the right direction.

Electronic Sports was the only specialist esports title in print media, so its content and production quality could be aimed squarely at what esports enthusiasts wanted. It also arrived as Warcraft III was taking off, and enormously influential moments such as WE.Sky's WCG world championships in 2005 and 2006 brought esports much closer to the general public.

The magazine began receiving more than a thousand letters a month, mostly from secondary school pupils and military academy cadets. The editors were curious enough to run a broader survey, and when they analysed the results they found that their main buyers were people with restricted access to a computer, in other words readers for whom using a computer was not particularly convenient.

For those readers the magazine adjusted its content considerably. It gave up on timely news and went deep instead, digging out material that was more specialist and more rewarding to read. He Qiu, for instance, launched a strongly opinionated column under his own name, alongside detailed illustrated match reports on the major tournaments.

On top of that came the publishing and distribution experience Li Xian had built up over many years as editor-in-chief. (A note here: editor-in-chief and executive editor-in-chief are very different jobs. The state sets strict qualification requirements for the editor-in-chief of a publication, and every esports figure named in this chapter held the executive title.) Li Xian already had mature distribution channels and could put the magazine into first, second and third tier cities.

There was a competing esports magazine in the same period, Esports China, but it had no publication licence, which restricted how it could be distributed, and it kept shrinking. It eventually switched to free direct-mail distribution, which needs no licence, but it faded away all the same.

So through 2005 and 2006, with the timing, the position and the people all in its favour, Electronic Sports was quietly delighted with itself.

Why quietly? I knew you could buy the magazine everywhere in those years, but I was still startled when I heard what it had actually been selling.

A magazine's real sales figures are normally kept secret. Only one person knows the true number, the person in charge of distribution, because only that person knows what the printer actually runs. That person is usually rather mysterious. At Electronic Sports, by all accounts, the job belonged to someone who had worked alongside Li Xian since the age of eighteen and was by then in his thirties.

The sales figures that almost every magazine gives out publicly are inflated. That is an open secret in publishing. The old rule was that the real number came from dividing the announced figure by four, although the formula has grown more complicated since, and I am not going to break the trade's rule by spelling it out.

When I heard the real monthly sales for Electronic Sports in 2005 and 2006, though, I ran into an awkward problem: I could not believe the number. The person I was interviewing even told me there was no point printing it, because nobody would believe it either. He also gave me the print runs of several other magazines from the same printer for comparison, which startled me further. Since those numbers involve confidential information about a great many magazines, and since I have no way to verify them, I will leave this part out.

All you need to know is that Electronic Sports was living comfortably on magazine sales alone, which is no small achievement.

Many readers will find that a strange thing to say. Surely it is obvious? What does a magazine live on, if not selling magazines?

Not so. Most magazines survive on advertising. Real monthly sales in the tens of thousands already count as good, and a profit of one or two yuan a copy will not keep an editorial office running, especially for the expensively produced high-priced titles that lose more money the more they print. Most magazines do not make their money from circulation.

Because Electronic Sports could make money from sales, everything it earned from advertising, special issues and events was pure profit. For a magazine only two years old, that was rare.

In March 2006, sales were so strong that the magazine went semi-monthly. In September 2006 a special issue written by the editor Dog_mi, The Four Heavenly Kings Teach You Micro, sold out as soon as it was released, with the first print run of 10,000 copies gone very quickly.

Good times never last, though, and at the end of 2006 an internal conflict broke out at Electronic Sports.

By most accounts He Qiu, the executive editor-in-chief at the time, wanted better pay and conditions for his editors and took a hard line on it, which set him against the publisher. What exactly happened is no longer clear, but the talks plainly failed, because He Qiu left in anger and took part of the editorial team with him to the rival Esports China. That had a real effect on a magazine that was only just settling into its stride.

OGC took over as the second executive editor-in-chief in 2006, hired a new group of staff and more or less steadied the situation. During that period he launched a strongly opinionated column of his own, as He Qiu had done.

Zhou Yi, the magazine's executive editor-in-chief at the time of writing, joined in this period too. He was initially responsible for its StarCraft coverage.

The recovery did not last. OGC left as well, for internal reasons, and the editor Youzi went to PGL. By then almost nobody from the founding team remained.

At the end of 2007 Modong, formerly the executive editor-in-chief of Esports China, came to Electronic Sports as its third executive editor-in-chief. What happened afterwards is rather strange.

The official account is that the heavy snow of early 2008 left issues unsold, and that the Wenchuan earthquake of May 12 delivered a second blow to publication, so that only a single combined issue came out between June and August that year.

What I was told, though, is that editors had been leaving steadily ever since Modong arrived. DouDou, Zhou Yi and Dog_mi all left in turn during 2008, and in the end Modong left as well.

The strange part is that in my interviews everyone stayed silent about what happened in that period, for all sorts of different reasons. One thing I could sense, though, is that they were all deeply disappointed by those years.

Why they left, and why they will not talk about it, I do not know, and I am not going to guess. I have to set this part aside and hope that when I write the next volume of this history, people will be willing to explain.

In 2009 the magazine's team fell apart. The global financial crisis had made the wider climate worse, manufacturers were cutting their advertising budgets and the whole esports industry was depressed. That was a real winter. For a time Electronic Sports kept operating with a staff of just two editors and one designer.

Then in 2010 the world economy began to warm up, manufacturers regained their energy, and esports clubs and tournaments started to recover. Zhou Yi returned to Electronic Sports as executive editor-in-chief and built an editorial team from nothing. That was the magazine's rebirth.

Zhou Yi is a man who astonished me.

Talking to him, I found his thinking so pure that at first I thought he was a little pedantic. Afterwards, going back over the conversation, some of what he had said made me reconsider.

To start with, Zhou Yi believes this is the worst era esports has had.

Take the media as an example, he said. Esports media still get most of their money from hardware manufacturers and game companies, and that creates a conflict that stops a publication assessing anything objectively. You review a tournament and find its sponsor is one of your advertisers. You review a game and find its operator is running a major tournament you need to cover and cannot afford to offend. Unlike much of the traditional press, whose advertisers come from unrelated industries, esports media are funded from inside their own field, and their reporting is troubled by all sorts of industry considerations as a result.

Zhou Yi believes the media have lost their value as media. The biggest measure of success is now whether you can attract attention, rather than whether your reporting is objective and fair.

So when he became executive editor-in-chief, Zhou Yi cut a great deal of the opinion content out of Electronic Sports. Unlike the executive editors before him, he did not write commentary pieces, and he required his editors to interview more than five people for an article and to let the facts do the talking.

Perhaps I had spent too long in Shanghai, where esports is booming, which is why hearing Zhou Yi argue the exact opposite came as such a shock. He rejected outright a whole set of practices that today's game and esports websites take for granted. I felt as though I were looking at a living fossil.

You may feel that Zhou Yi's worries are simply the worries of print in general, since readers have been drifting away from print for years, since short and fast has become the mainstream standard for how people want their information, and since the readers with restricted computer access described earlier will only dwindle as the economy and technology develop. You might ask whether a magazine that refuses to follow the current and instead returns to traditional journalism is pushing itself into an even more marginal corner, and whether Electronic Sports will be squeezed out because of it.

That was the main reason I was shocked at first. Even so, I do not believe we will stop needing fair, objective, in-depth reporting. The media have that responsibility too, and perhaps Electronic Sports will find a more suitable angle from which to keep developing in future.

After listening to Zhou Yi, I began to reconsider the current esports boom. It was like having a bucket of water thrown over you when you are worked up: you come back to normal, and you look again, calmly, at how close to frenzy the esports scene has become.

What Zhou Yi says is extreme, but he has a point. Esports needs to judge its own future objectively and fairly, and manufacturer-led esports really is one of the big problems facing us now.

Put simply, at this stage all of the esports industry's eggs are in one basket, and we have no other basket.

There is nothing wrong with hardware and game companies supporting esports. But if esports becomes dependent on them, what happens the day their interests move elsewhere? Suppose League of Legends stops being popular and Tencent shifts its focus to other kinds of game. How does esports carry on living?

Everyone's goals line up at the moment, but over the long run, are their goals really the same as the goals of esports? That deserves a question mark, and we need to plan ahead. Another question sits in front of us at the same time: without them, who would be better placed to lead all this? Perhaps that is something the whole industry needs to think about.

Anyway, back to the point.

The part Electronic Sports played during the exploratory years of Chinese esports cannot be erased. Most of what we see is the contribution made in public, but the magazine also did a great deal of work behind the scenes. Using a relatively traditional medium, it carried an accurate concept of esports upwards to regulators at ministry level and outwards to regions where computers were still uncommon, clearing the way for esports to develop healthily and leaving a profound mark on the entire industry.

Electronic Sports, a print magazine with worries.