Chapter 28. XUGA, the Xi'an University Esports Alliance

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二十八 西安高校电子竞技联盟 XUGA

First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 21, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19641401

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.

In 2010 I asked Guanshui Qiuzhang, a forum handle that means roughly "chief of idle chatter", how many editions XUGA had run by then.

Twelve, the Chief said.

I asked how many he was running each year now.

Two, he said, one per semester.

I said he had been at it a long time and it must have been hard work.

It has become a habit, he said. I could not find a sponsor this year, so I split the games up and ran them separately. I am still working out how to get Counter-Strike and Winning Eleven done.

That moved me.

XUGA is short for the Xi'an University Esports Alliance. I set the organisation up in Xi'an in 2003, building on the strong following CGA had in Counter-Strike at the time. Round after round of selection and promotion brought the 37 largest universities in Xi'an together and helped every one of them start its own esports society. I taught them one by one how to write an application, how to deal with their teachers, how to work with the attitude their university took towards games, and after a year of events the whole thing was finally on its feet.

Many of the students who ran those university societies back then are in the games industry today, working in media, operations, marketing, distribution and even business development, and they have all built something of their own. It is hard for me to say whether XUGA shaped the course of their lives or they shaped XUGA. Sometimes I would like to gather that group of old comrades for a reunion and talk over how rough those years were, but most of them are scattered across the country and the chances are slim.

In 2003 I was still a student in Xi'an. I thought every university in the city had a lively esports scene but there was no single platform to show it. suhO, then studying at Xi'an International University, was already a WCG China champion, and Sky had just come from Henan to Xi'an to join WE, which was still called the YolinY team.

What I had in mind at first was simple. Bringing the best players from every university together to compete struck me as an exciting picture, so I went and did it.

Nobody supported it. Even my colleagues at CGA were against it and saw no point in it. Fortunately Yang Chen, CGA's marketing director at the time, thought it was worth doing. He balanced the various interests until everyone accepted my plan, and only then could XUGA go ahead.

Back to the point. XUGA got under way, and it went through every kind of hardship.

Publicity went out as two news posts a week. I received a dozen or so applications every week and reviewed them one by one. I remember getting up at eight every morning, buying a large bottle of water at the supermarket and going straight to the university computer lab, where I sat until ten at night, sorting and filing material without a break and then talking with the applicants, mostly to see how they went about their work and what they had done before.

Looking back at the whole process, that stretch was the most comfortable part of it, because only my body was tired while my mind was racing. I felt I was doing something that mattered. It was probably the thinnest I have ever been. For two months I ate one bowl of noodles a day and drank one large bottle of water. Towards the end I nearly gave myself a stomach condition and had constant stomach pain, and only then did I understand why that advert with a drill twisting inside a stomach made my father so angry.

Once the alliance had grown past 30 universities, I started planning the first alliance tournament.

My thinking was simple. Find an internet café, get the café to put up some prizes, mark off a competition area, run two days and be done. Much the same way a lot of people today think running a tournament is easy.

I had watched plenty of tournaments by then but had organised almost none. Perhaps it was ignorance that made me fearless. I went ahead and staged an event for more than 500 people.

Finding a venue alone got me nowhere. There was no money. Never mind prize money, I would have had to pay for the computer time at the café myself. Since there was no backing out by then, I could only copy the way other people did it and go out looking for sponsors.

The way I pitched for sponsorship then looks like a joke to me now. I would go to a big internet café, make an appointment with the manager, walk in and start talking. No documents, no proposal, no slides. By the end they would politely show me out.

Then one day, while I was talking to the owner of an internet café, a heavy-set middle-aged man in glasses set me straight. He was not from the café. He was a Xi'an distributor for a monitor brand and happened to be there on business with the owner that day. I paid no attention to any of that and simply started talking, so he had to sit to one side and listen. After hearing me argue with the owner, he seemed moved by how earnest I was, and he said this: first of all, a sponsor is not afraid of spending money. It spends money to make money. If your proposal lets me put in one yuan today and earn one yuan tomorrow, then the day after that I will give you as much as you ask for.

That one remark woke me up. I began to think about my whole plan from the sponsor's side, and my thinking became a great deal clearer. I started preparing documents and proposals, contacting the sports bureau, analysing what sponsors were after and working out how they could make money and build momentum. That way of thinking has stayed with me ever since.

Working that way, I soon found Coca-Cola. The company was rolling out a plan to block Pepsi's arrival in Xi'an. Pepsi had built a bottling plant in the city at the end of 2003, and to protect its market share Coca-Cola began signing exclusivity agreements with Xi'an's larger internet cafés and retailers. That kind of plainly unfair competition went unchecked in China, and Pepsi was said to be using the same method to hold Coca-Cola down in the northeast. None of that was my business.

I often say I was lucky to get XUGA off the ground, and that is true. Coca-Cola was at that point trying hard to close a deal with the best located internet café in Xi'an, next to the Bell Tower, and the café was reluctant. The reason was simple. Apart from cola itself, Coca-Cola's other drinks were not especially popular, and once an exclusivity deal was signed, customers would order things the café could not supply, which over time would hurt business.

So when I mentioned to the man from Coca-Cola that XUGA needed a venue, his eyes lit up. The café sat right in the city centre, which was impressive enough, but it was a long way from the universities and had only just opened, so it had never had much of a crowd or much of a name. XUGA could make its name in one go, and Coca-Cola could use the event as a bargaining chip in its exclusivity talks with the café.

I will skip the countless complications in between. In the end the first XUGA championship was agreed: Coca-Cola paid, the internet café took the naming rights and I organised it. The two-day event was a great success. Spectators packed the café until there was no room to move. There were four game titles, and close to 500 players took part.

I did not take a single yuan for my work on that event. In fact I deferred a semester's tuition and used the money to pay the few core members who had handled publicity, organisation and the technical side all along. My student counsellor eventually chased me so hard that I had no choice but to tell my mother, and in the end she quietly sent me the tuition money again.

In 2004 I was leaving for a job in Shanghai, so I handed the alliance to Guanshui Qiuzhang. A lot of people objected. They said he had no outstanding ability and was rather introverted, and that the alliance would have no future in his hands.

I saw it differently. The Chief was steady in his work, patient and responsible, modest and level-headed, and those qualities were exactly what would let him keep the alliance going and run it well.

Nearly ten years on, XUGA, the Xi'an University Esports Alliance, is still the best organised and most energetic grassroots university esports body in China. I believe it will bring together the campus culture work of the entire northwest and become the voice of that region.

XUGA