Chapter 31. From Jianwu Hongyanxiao to IG.xiaoxiao: Sun Yalong

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 三十一 从剑舞红颜笑 到 IG.xiaoxiao

First published in the author's Zhihu column on June 17, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19780186

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.

Many people probably know the name Xiaoxiao because he was the former captain of iG's League of Legends squad. He led iG to WCG, TGA, SWL and several other domestic titles, and he represented China abroad many times. What many people may not know is that Xiaoxiao was also a Korean killer. Jianwu Hongyanxiao, a name that carried real weight in the Dungeon Fighter Online scene, is the full form of that ID, and again and again he fought his way alone into the grand final while the rest of the Chinese contingent was being wiped out. In Dungeon Fighter Online, or DNF, a fighting game developed by Koreans and dominated by the Japanese, he won China a place at the table.

On January 20, 2014, after IG.xiaoxiao, Sun Yalong, retired, he became a full-time game caster. His humorous, comic style earned him the nickname "the crosstalk performer of the esports scene", after the traditional Chinese comic dialogue.

Yet Xiaoxiao's own experience matches what veteran crosstalk performers say about themselves: the person who makes everyone else laugh is often the one who cannot laugh at all.

Sun Yalong was born on March 24, 1988, in Bajiao Village, Yuzhong District, Chongqing. It was a residential compound for teachers. His paternal grandfather and grandmother were both veteran teachers at Bashu Middle School, his father ran a small business, and his mother worked at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. The family was in fact comfortably off, but his mother's professional habits made her strict about money, so Xiaoxiao's childhood was genuinely hard up.

Even so, for an Aries who loved excitement and adventure, that life sharpened his wits rather than dulling them. From an early age he got into the habit of refusing the obvious route whenever he was cornered, and of looking for shortcuts that other people had not thought of. It shaped everything that came afterwards.

The effect showed up as early as junior high school. By then Xiaoxiao was thoroughly obsessed with games. He played everything: StarCraft, Counter-Strike, The King of Fighters '97 and '98, Stone Age and more. He also played well, ranking first in his school at both StarCraft and Counter-Strike. The problem was that he never had money to play with. What could he do? Cheating and swindling were out, and nobody would hire a child labourer, so only a third option was left: get somebody else to pay. How could that possibly work?

Xiaoxiao said, I can manage it. He was at a key junior high school, and its students had one useful characteristic: they had money. Whoever paid for his games got him on their side, and he carried them to wins. That is how he played his way through to high school.

His grades, meanwhile, had collapsed, apart from the Chinese his grandmother taught him and the chemistry his grandfather taught him. Schools and society took a dim view of gaming at the time, and Xiaoxiao had no thought of making a career of it, so he spent a year cramming art with the idea of applying to an art academy.

Drawing, quick sketching, colour work: he practised all day, and a year of intensive study produced several presentable pieces. In the end his marks in the academic subjects were too low, so he gave up on the art academy and enrolled instead in the film and television animation programme at a local university.

There is an old saying that no skill is ever wasted, and it is quite right. He never made it to the art academy, but drawing led Xiaoxiao into a remarkable romance.

It happened in a figure sketching class during his first year. The model was a very quiet, graceful girl, and Xiaoxiao fell for her at first sight. He said that her innocence and shyness were like a newly released game, as though there were endless content waiting to be explored.

He pursued her and it worked. A week later she told him that she did not want a boyfriend while she was at university, and they broke up.

The story turned that fast. Bet you did not see it coming.

Of course, if Sun Yalong had given up there, he would never have become the Xiaoxiao everyone knows.

He did not pester her and he did not force the issue. He patiently settled in nearby and waited for his moment. In his second year he heard that she liked playing games. His eyes lit up. This was the opening, and a plan was born.

The plan started with one of her roommates. Put simply, whatever they played, Xiaoxiao played too. He would grind to a high level in the shortest possible time, then casually and quite naturally offer to carry the girls, so that he could show her his talent for games.

This was also the stage at which Xiaoxiao sharpened his instinct for digging into game mechanics. A poor student could not simply throw money at a high-level account, so he had to force himself to find fast routes through the levelling and to win with techniques and ideas that nobody else had considered. That took him from Zhu Xian and other titles to Audition Online, and then to DNF.

The Audition Online stage deserves a proper telling. It is the classic battle of Xiaoxiao's life: the weak beating the strong, an underdog turning the tables, wits and nerve together.

When Xiaoxiao heard that the girl had taken up Audition Online, and that she had a real talent for it, he was stunned. This was the game that every boy in his dormitory despised most. The cartoonish online games had been bad enough. How was he supposed to deal with this one?

He was an Aries, after all. Once the brief shock had passed he started practising immediately, without hesitation and without embarrassment, under the daily contempt of the whole dormitory. And there was a bigger shock waiting: he heard that the girl already had a boyfriend inside the game. For most people that would have been the end of it. Why keep practising? Xiaoxiao quietly opened Audition Online in single-player mode and carried on.

Some readers may wonder why I am spending so much space on something that looks irrelevant. In fact this is exactly how the distance between one person and another opens up, one small thing at a time. He made a plan and he carried it out, and in the end an opportunity came. He not only seized it perfectly, he succeeded.

A dramatic ending

One day the girl's in-game partner invited her out to dinner, somewhere a long way from their university. When Xiaoxiao heard about it, he first tried to talk her out of going, worried that she would run into a bad sort. She went anyway. There was nothing he could do, since they were only ordinary friends by then, so he kept texting her to find out where they were and what they were doing.

Some time after eleven that night, she did indeed run into a bad sort. The man wanted her to stay, and he had taken her wallet and her identity papers. She phoned Xiaoxiao for help. He did not offer a word of comfort. Instead he gave her a fierce dressing down, told her that his dormitory was already locked for the night, and said she would have to find her own way back.

Look closely at how Xiaoxiao handled it. Without thinking about it, she had cast him as a fallback and assumed that somebody would always be there to catch her. In a single sentence he denied himself that role in her mind. That was the cunning.

At the very moment he hung up, Xiaoxiao jumped straight out of the second-floor window of his dormitory, found a motorcycle taxi outside and raced across the city. That was the courage.

Half an hour later he arrived nearby and saw at once that the man was still at the bus stop, hassling her. She could not get her wallet back and had no way of getting home.

Xiaoxiao's arrival left her stunned, as though a god had descended from the sky. I will leave the slow motion and the complicated expressions of that scene to your imagination.

He also realised quickly that the situation was not simple. The man was loud and aggressive and looked like a thug, and Xiaoxiao was on his territory. He had to get the wallet back and keep both of them safe. How?

Clearly, a straight fight was never Xiaoxiao's style.

He took out his phone at once and walked to a spot far enough away to look casual but close enough for the man to half hear him. He pretended to call an older brother, and this brother happened to be eating nearby with a group of mates and would be over very soon.

After the call, Xiaoxiao neither confronted the man nor made any show of force. He said nothing at all, crossed to the far side of the road and stood there as though waiting for someone.

Why do that? Xiaoxiao said there were three reasons. First, he was afraid of a sudden attack. Second, it was a bluff. Third, it gave the man a way out and time to think it over.

Sure enough, the bluff, which followed no script at all, had been running for less than five minutes when the man cracked. He suddenly handed the wallet and the rest of her things back to her, jumped into a taxi and fled.

That night, after Xiaoxiao saw her home, she became his girlfriend.

Looking at the whole episode, it had its twists, and it took both nerve and calculation. It was hardly earth-shaking, and no blood was spilled. Still, the quick thinking and the fast response he showed help us understand the esports career that came later.

DNF and the road to semi-professional esports

Xiaoxiao first picked up DNF during its closed beta. Not long after the open beta he reached Supreme 6, a player-versus-player rank, and stood first in the Southwest region, far clear of the second-placed player at Supreme 4. At the first TGA City Championship in 2010 he entered the western regional final in Chengdu as one of the top five duelling ranks in his region.

He tore through the bracket to the final, where he met a player and a hole in the tournament rules that he could not solve at the time. The player was Yuanqi, a future teammate. The hole in the rules was this: the in-game equipment and costumes a player competed in were whatever that player already owned. Xiaoxiao had no money for gear and had reached the final in rags, while Yuanqi was wearing a top-tier strength mage set that reflected damage back at his opponent. Later editions of TGA opened up all equipment, and that particular set was banned outright. In the first edition, though, Xiaoxiao simply had to face a situation with no answer.

After losing the first game he saw immediately that going at a damage reflection set with his usual style meant certain death. In the second game he swapped his lightsaber, with its long, fast combo chains, for a club, which had fewer moves but hit much harder. That reduced the chance of triggering the reflection and so reduced the damage he took.

Even so, Xiaoxiao lost the match 3:4.

That tournament started to teach Xiaoxiao that equipment mattered too. He still had no money for it, so he went into the Supreme rooms looking for wealthy players to take on as apprentices. He would push their rank for free, and in exchange he got to use their accounts. After several rounds of this he finally had a stable, properly geared duelling account.

Then news arrived that the upcoming WCG had added DNF as a discipline. Xiaoxiao pulled two people together at short notice, formed a team, started training and won the Chongqing regional team title. That year, however, DNF offered no travel expenses, which meant that after winning, the three of them would still have to pay their own way to Shanghai. China's DNF scene was already full of very strong players, so Xiaoxiao thought the trip would be pointless. He was still studying and could not turn professional, so he let it go.

At that point someone from the Chengdu region got in touch. It was Yuanqi, the player who had beaten him. Yuanqi had money to spare, and his team had won the Chengdu regional team title, but he had exactly the same worry as Xiaoxiao. He felt his team was not strong enough and wanted to rebuild before the national event, which is how he came to think of Xiaoxiao.

The terms were simple. As long as Xiaoxiao competed under the name of Yuanqi's guild, Yuanqi would cover his costs. It was such a good deal that you would expect Xiaoxiao to take it, but he turned it down. He had already told his two teammates that they were not going, and accepting now would mean deceiving his friends. As a Chongqing man, he put his brothers first.

A few days later, at a gathering of friends from the game, the subject came up over drinks. One of his teammates said to him: even if you had not told us anything, you should still go. Real brothers would never stand in your way.

Xiaoxiao says he will remember that line for the rest of his life.

So the Chengdu side, made up of Yuanqi, Xiaoxiao and AS, went to Shanghai. Facing the best players in the country, the Sichuan and Chongqing contingent showed no fear. In the deciding game, with the score at 1:1, Xiaoxiao beat the entire opposing team on his own and took the national title.

Three months later, the three team champions and one individual champion travelled to South Korea to represent China at the DNF Asia Championship. Only after arriving did they understand how much better other people were. DNF had been running in South Korea for three years, and the way Korean players thought about the game was a world away from the Chinese approach. The Japanese players, meanwhile, had years of grounding in fighting games. Before the event even began, the Chinese side felt their chances of winning were slim. Twelve players from three countries were split into four groups for a round-robin, and once play began every Chinese player except Xiaoxiao was knocked out.

One detail needs explaining here. In DNF, using an ultimate costs a clear cube fragment, and those had to be paid for. When Chinese players were first learning the game, whether to save money or for some other reason, they settled on an unwritten rule: no ultimates in a duel. That convention pushed early Chinese DNF towards a flashy, combo-heavy style of play. Once Xiaoxiao spotted the problem, he took the other road. He trained specifically at using ultimates and combined them with short combos that looked plain but worked, and this became DNF's other school of play: the ultimate cooldown style, in which you stall for time and fight once your ultimate is available again.

That choice mattered far more than it sounds. The reason Xiaoxiao could adapt quickly to the way foreign players competed was that none of them had ever bothered saving clear cube fragments.

And so Xiaoxiao went from the last four to the final, where he faced the South Korean player Lee Jin-seong, who had been playing for nearly three years. As soon as the match started he could see how wide the gap was. He resisted to the end but lost 2:3.

Xiaoxiao finished second, took 10,000 yuan in prize money home and gave it to his mother. He still had no intention of turning professional and went back to his studies. Then came the second DNF Asia Championship, held in Shanghai, where the field was chosen by public vote. Xiaoxiao was picked, although he only found out when someone from Tencent came to tell him.

Because that event was on home soil, it attracted a great deal of attention and very high expectations. The tournament itself is not worth dwelling on: once again the Chinese contingent was wiped out apart from Xiaoxiao. One moment does deserve a mention. In the group stage he faced Korea's number one Poison King, a player called Changshe, meaning long tongue, who liked to stick his tongue out to taunt his opponents before a match. The two were locked together with nothing between them. On his last sliver of health Xiaoxiao was caught in the man's net. Fortunately he had knocked his opponent into the air as well, but the moment the man got back on his feet Xiaoxiao was finished. At exactly that moment, as if guided by something, Xiaoxiao used a move that almost nobody ever touched: Chain Thrust, a skill that did so little damage that it normally went unused. That was how Xiaoxiao killed Changshe at the last second and turned the match around.

Unfortunately, in the final he ran into a Japanese player using an extremely obscure class, one that perhaps only Japanese players had much enthusiasm for: the Grappler. It was so rarely seen that Xiaoxiao had barely practised against it, and he finished as runner-up once more, 2:3.

After that tournament, plenty of people online teased him about the yalong in his name, Sun Yalong. Since ya means second, they said he was fated to be the eternal runner-up.

Through 2011 Xiaoxiao carried on studying while collecting DNF titles large and small, yet he was slowly withdrawing from the DNF scene. At the same time, through his friend AS, he came across a game then in closed beta in China: League of Legends.

A new line: League of Legends

Relying on the instinct for games he had built up over many years, Xiaoxiao was already competing with the well-known Mengdeyujian for the title of best player on the Chinese server by the time the League of Legends closed beta ended.

When the open beta arrived, Xiaoxiao changed his name from Jianwu Hongyanxiao to Xiangduxiu, and he led the server for a full six months.

By then professional League of Legends teams were beginning to appear in China. EHOME, WE and CCM, whose roster was made up entirely of players from Hong Kong, had all raised their flags.

CCM's captain, White, approached Xiaoxiao and asked whether he wanted to turn professional. The team was looking to replace its top laner.

This was the first time Xiaoxiao had faced the choice of becoming a professional, even though he was already a player with a great deal of domestic and international experience.

League of Legends was still in its double-mage phase, and Xiaoxiao's signature champions were Vladimir, Brand and Fiddlesticks, which happened to suit both mid and top lane. He was also about to graduate. He was tempted.

In April 2011 Xiaoxiao took every bit of pocket money he had not surrendered to his mother and bought a plane ticket to Beijing. CCM's team manager offered him 3,000 yuan a month with food and lodging. Xiaoxiao said that was actually quite high by the standards of home.

Beijing, the capital, a well-known professional esports club, a rising esports title. Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction.

Instead, Xiaoxiao had barely caught his breath in Beijing when he was told the very next day that the lease on the team house had run out and everyone had to move out. The owner's family business had run into trouble, the funding had dried up, and there was no money left.

The second TGA Grand Prix was only two months away, and it was the reason Xiaoxiao and the rest of CCM had come. So they pooled their own money, crammed into a small guesthouse at 50 yuan a night and trained in a little internet café on the corner. Conditions were hard, but at least everyone pulled together. After a month, they found that the salaries had stopped as well. The money was cut off, and that was a serious problem.

After talking it over, they decided to go to Chengdu. Partly this meant falling back on AG, a team their manager HOT knew well, and partly it meant getting away from EHOME in the Beijing region. AG at the time was mainly a CrossFire team, and it had an internet café of its own. So CCM went to Chengdu, lived and trained there for a month, and won the Chengdu leg of TGA.

While training in Chengdu, Xiaoxiao quietly practised a new champion on a smurf account: Rumble. Nobody rated the champion at the time, and few players used him at home or abroad, but Xiaoxiao worked out that he was extremely strong and only required the right technique. His earlier tournament experience had also taught him something: hold one thing back for the decisive moment.

That decisive moment arrived almost immediately. In the last match of the TGA grand final in Shanghai, CCM faced WE. Straight away the opposition banned Brand and Vladimir and first-picked Fiddlesticks. Every move went for the throat. Without preparation, CCM would have been behind at once. At that decisive moment Xiaoxiao brought out his secret weapon: Rumble. The opponents laughed. Xiaoxiao laughed too.

Then let's play

That match was a best-of-one, decided by a single game. WE quickly built an advantage. Ruofeng was playing Corki as the AD carry and was already very fed. Perhaps thinking that nobody on the other side dared touch him, Ruofeng went off to push the bottom lane alone. Xiaoxiao decided to ambush him from a bush. When Xiaoxiao came out, Ruofeng did not run. He fought head on and lost the duel. CCM used the opening to take Baron Nashor, turned the game around and won the TGA title that year.

They went back to Beijing as happy champions, and a bucket of cold water was waiting for them.

The TGA prize money would not be paid out for several months, there was still no money for salaries, and the whole team had run completely dry.

This was June 2011. Chinese esports had been going for 13 years since 1998, and a full national championship team still went hungry. It is a sad thing to record.

After a few days of going without food, HOT decided to take the whole team to Tianjin to stay with his parents. The only thing holding the team together now was a single idea: WCG, one month away. It was a dream and a place to prove themselves. For WCG, every one of them held on through the pain.

Then, with four players already at the railway station and ready to leave, one of them phoned to say that he was not going to carry on. He did not want to go hungry any longer. He saw no future in it, his girlfriend was going to find him a job in Beijing, and he had decided to stay behind.

For the rest of CCM this was devastating. Losing a player at that point amounted to withdrawing from the tournament, and the train was about to leave. What could they do?

Every one of them was frantic, yet they still worked patiently on him over the phone. Years of friendship, the dream the five of them shared, all the training they had put in together: they appealed to his feelings and to his reason. With 20 minutes left before the train departed, he came back.

Five fingers closed into a fist.

They travelled on to Tianjin. To this day Xiaoxiao still remembers the most delicious late-night meal he ever ate, on that evening: the shaobing flatbreads and soy milk that HOT's mother went out and bought for them.

A month later, at the WCG China national final, they faced WE again. Everyone had a WCG dream, so the match mattered to both sides. WE once again took control, and CCM had to work hard for an opening. At the most critical moment, Xiaoxiao's teammate Lufei used a flash and ultimate on Annie to stun all five WE players. CCM seized the chance, wiped them out, turned the game around in one push and took the WCG China title.

When it was over the five of them hugged each other and cried, shouting and jumping. Once they had calmed down, their first decision was this: disband on the spot, go home and train on their own, and meet again in South Korea.

What a cruel way to wake from a dream. Painful and joyful at once.

But fate never shortchanges people who have a dream and act on it.

The dramatic turn came that very evening. Wang Sicong, the son of China's richest man, Wang Jianlin, decided to acquire CCM. The team was renamed iG, and the two months of back pay that CCM owed its players were settled immediately.

From that day Xiaoxiao was formally a professional esports player, and he remained IG.xiaoxiao until he retired.

From Jianwu Hongyanxiao to IG.xiaoxiao.

Sun Yalong.