Chapter 35. The Entertainment Wave in Esports: Xiaozhi, the Caster

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 三十五 电竞娱乐化浪潮 解说小智

First published in the author's Zhihu column on October 17, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19869029

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.

Mention the caster Xiaozhi today and some people wonder what he looks like, since he has never shown his face in public, and others about the tens of millions of yuan he has made from esports casting. Before I interviewed him, I was curious about something else. How had that down-to-earth "Xiaozhi humour" of his come about? I even wondered for a while whether he had started out as a street entertainer at Tianqiao in Beijing.

Then he turned up at Huludao station in a chauffeur-driven luxury car to collect me, and we talked for two days.

Only then did I discover that this caster, who spends every week finding new ways to make people laugh in his League of Legends videos, is a man of few words with a deep interest in history, and the third generation of a family of officials.

Xiaozhi's grandfather was once the local official responsible for the area's economy. His father was a bank president who later left his post to set up a factory and go into business. One maternal uncle was among the two or three biggest merchants in the town, and another was head of the public security bureau. The family's roots ran deep, and locally they were a power in themselves.

Going by the script, a boy who grew up in surroundings like that should not have turned out the way Xiaozhi did.

And indeed, until 2009 at least, his life looked quite different.

Yang Fengzhi was born on January 6, 1989, in Jinzhou, Liaoning. Unlike other children, he was born with a defect, a thick tongue that slurred his speech, and it made his childhood a torment.

Being mocked by everyone around you from an early age is a cruel experience. It left him sensitive, stubborn, quick-tempered and combative, and above all fond of fighting, which many years later would land him in serious trouble.

Fortunately, Xiaozhi refused to accept his lot. From primary school onwards he forced himself to practise talking to other people.

Telling jokes to the class during study periods turned out to be a very good opportunity.

At first, the moment Xiaozhi opened his mouth he was the joke to his classmates. He did not give up. He kept collecting comic material from everyday life, and at the same time he learned to laugh at himself.

As Tyrion, the dwarf at the centre of Game of Thrones, puts it, never forget what you are, because the world will not. Turn what stands in your way into something that carries you forward, and then you have no weak spot. Wear it as armour and no one can use it to hurt you.

Xiaozhi says his early humour was simple and shallow, purely physical. On his way up to the front of the class, for instance, he would pretend to trip clumsily, and the whole room would burst out laughing.

Two years later he was not only at ease with physical comedy but had also worked out a smoother verbal technique, with a proper set-up, development, turn and payoff. He would deliberately magnify his own flaws and use self-mockery to create an absurd contrast. That was the prototype of the "Xiaozhi humour" that defines his casting today.

I would like to be able to write here that he and his classmates then lived in harmony ever after.

But life, as a director, was not willing to leave his story that plain.

Xiaozhi says that Kong Ergou's novel Tales of the Northeast: Twenty Years of the Underworld is very true to life. The taste for fighting among people in the northeast, and the harshness of the environment he grew up in, were things he lived through himself.

On the first day of one school year, Xiaozhi was robbed five times on his way to school. Sometimes a single loud remark while he was caught up in a game at the internet café was enough to set off a gang brawl across the district.

Growing up in that environment, there were two ways to avoid being pushed around. Back down, or be the better fighter.

Xiaozhi says he did try backing down.

The first time a robber raised a brick at him, he sensibly handed over his money. The second time he handed it over without being asked. Then a group came to his classroom to demand money, and he snapped.

What a fight that was.

All Xiaozhi remembers is holding a brick and bringing it down on the leader's head again and again, with fragments of brick flying everywhere. How many people were hitting him, and how he got the scars still visible on his face and body today, he has forgotten.

He began to understand that in that world, the only way not to be bullied or laughed at was to fight back and be stronger than everyone else.

He was eventually expelled, after countless further acts of resistance and countless further fights.

Junior middle school was as far as his formal education went.

His father was furious about the expulsion and told him to go back to school, but he flatly refused. School had given him too many bad memories.

His father's temper flared as well. If you are so tough, he said, then stay in the house and never go out.

Xiaozhi's own stubbornness rose to meet it. Fine, he said, I will stay.

He stayed for a year.

Every day before leaving, his father locked the door from the outside, threw the main power switch and left him nothing but a pile of books. So Xiaozhi read at home. No games, no computer, no television. Even the light in the toilet did not come on.

Xiaozhi says it was pure defiance. They said he could not stick it out, so he was going to stick it out in front of them.

Over that year he read every book in the house. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, Tang and Song poetry, the History of the Ming, Qing dynasty verse and much else. The year shaped him so deeply that his tastes ended up unlike those of anyone his own age. Other people walk about with earphones in listening to pop songs. He likes to put his phone in his shirt pocket and play taiping geci out loud, the old ballad form sung by crosstalk performers, for all the world like a little old man.

After a year, his mother could not bear to watch it any longer. What if the boy made himself ill?

And so he was let loose again.

Once freed, Xiaozhi settled into a shabby little internet café and had what he says were the happiest days of his life.

Legend of Mir, Counter-Strike, Warcraft III, Chenghai 3C. Anything he could play with other people, he played day and night. He made many friends at the café, and he also had Bi Ge, a friend from middle school, for company. Bi Ge is the important figure he mentions in every one of his videos now. He is a real person, and at the time he was Xiaozhi's only friend. When Bi Ge later left to study elsewhere, Xiaozhi felt his absence badly.

Most important of all, the owner of that internet café was said to have been a local hard man in his younger days, so the small-time thugs nearby did not dare come in and cause trouble. He looked after Xiaozhi, and for the first time Xiaozhi felt the warmth of belonging somewhere.

Life went on like that. Xiaozhi was happy, but his father was in agony.

Xiaozhi says the older generation in the northeast still thinks in traditional terms. A man ought to have a job to go to, work that feeds a family. Xiaozhi was plainly not going to be that man, and his father could not out-stubborn him. So his father changed his own plans instead, gave up his position in the public sector and went into business. His reasoning was simple. If he could put enough money aside, Xiaozhi could spend the rest of his life doing whatever he wanted.

There really is no limit to what parents will do for their children.

As it turned out, the business did very well.

Xiaozhi went from the third generation of an official family straight to the second generation of a wealthy one.

From 2005 onwards, his father set about grooming him to take over the company, taking him along to meetings at the factory and on purchasing trips so that he would learn every layer of how a business runs.

If the script had carried on like that, this piece would have been the origin story of a township entrepreneur.

But heaven, that incorrigible rewriter of scripts, stepped in again.

A chemical accident in 2007.

A mould worker at the factory left a chemical in the dormitory without sealing it. Xiaozhi finished work that afternoon and went in to sleep.

We will pass over what happened next.

After the doctors pulled him through, Xiaozhi was left with a 40 centimetre incision. That was the end of his time as a trainee, and he was sent back to the city to recover.

Leaving the township entrepreneur training course behind was probably a disappointment for his father. For Xiaozhi it was an accident that turned into a new beginning.

Esports caster

He could not work while he was recovering, but he could use a computer, and he became obsessed with CH3C, that is Chenghai 3C, one of the custom RPG maps built for Warcraft III. In January 2008 he sent an email to a caster whose videos he watched regularly.

In the email, Xiaozhi suggested that the caster add comic elements to his videos, which would make them more appealing.

Whether that was lucky or unlucky is hard to say.

This popular caster did something he rarely did and replied, but the reply was distinctly ungracious. I simply do not like that style, he wrote. If you think you can do it, go ahead and do it yourself.

Xiaozhi's stubborn streak took over on the spot. Fine, he would.

His first Chenghai 3C video, made in what would become the Xiaozhi style, went up on Tudou soon afterwards. It reached 50,000 views almost instantly, more than the other caster was getting, and in 2008 that was a very respectable result.

The audience took to him strongly, and Xiaozhi felt as though he had suddenly found a direction in life. He threw himself into it with something close to fervour and began uploading a new video every day. Anyone who has made videos knows how draining a workload like that is.

The view counts soon jumped to another level, with his best episode reaching 700,000.

Life was comfortable that year for Xiaozhi, who was not yet 20.

His family gave him 10,000 yuan a month in pocket money, more than enough for him and his girlfriend to live well and travel around.

He was doing well in every sense. Given the sort of script his life tends to follow, though, you have already guessed that the next reversal was on its way.

In 2009, Xiaozhi's father was suddenly double-crossed by a business partner from his own extended family. Overnight the thriving factory had nothing more to do with him, while the large loans taken out to build it landed squarely on his shoulders.

Xiaozhi, a carefree young man sprinting down an artistic path, became in an instant a nobody rolling up his sleeves to scrape together his next meal.

No money, no job, no qualifications, and an enormous family debt to repay.

The fall from the sky into the mud left him no time at all to take it in.

Next month there would not be a single yuan coming in. What was he going to live on?

After a brief calculation, Xiaozhi took the last month's pocket money his parents gave him and rented a unit in a local shopping centre for 4,000 yuan a year, water and electricity included. With what remained he planned to learn the clothing trade from a relative.

To sell stock, you first have to learn how to buy it.

For the next year, at least two days of every month went like this.

At seven in the evening, he and his girlfriend boarded the old green slow train from Huludao to Beijing, because they did not dare pay for a high-speed ticket. They reached Beijing railway station at one or two in the morning. The moment they were off the train, they rushed to the all-night ticket window to buy the return tickets, so that they would have seats to put their bags on.

With the tickets bought, they went to the McDonald's upstairs and ordered one portion of fries. Every time, his girlfriend told him to eat first. He would eat half and leave the rest to her, she would eat half of that and push it back to him.

Then they hurried to Beijing Zoo, where a clothing wholesale market existed only from five in the morning to noon each day, so they had to be there before four to claim a good spot. By just before five, several thousand buyers from all over the country would be waiting silently in front of the gates in pitch darkness. Xiaozhi has never forgotten how oppressive that felt.

After a sleepless night and a morning of snatching up stock like people fighting over food, the two of them walked out at noon with a huge bag each and headed straight for the underground station. They would not even spend the money on a pedicab.

Once on the underground they had to ride round Beijing a few times, because the train home was at three in the afternoon and the railway station was so crowded that arriving early left nowhere even to put your feet. The underground was packed too, but at least they could sit for a while.

Xiaozhi says his biggest dream at the time was to have 30,000 yuan, enough to buy a second-hand Volkswagen Santana to collect stock in.

Looking back now, Xiaozhi is grateful for those days. On every trip, the green carriages were packed with all sorts. People travelling to Beijing to petition the authorities, women dreaming of getting rich overnight, men covered in tattoos. He was meeting real society for the first time, and meeting his real self as well.

Those swings between high and low wore away the aloof pride he used to carry. He learned to compromise with life and to live steadily off one small deal after another, all of which gave him a great deal of experience for the Taobao shop he would run later.

He was only 20 that year, and his life had already turned over several times.

In 2010, with the backing of several friends who loved Chenghai 3C, Xiaozhi sold the clothing shop on and went back to making casting videos. He found that CH3C had already fallen into decline as Dota rose. Rather than give up, he decided the game needed more tournaments to revive it.

So he turned around and went off to organise tournaments.

To find sponsorship, Xiaozhi went to Beijing to drink with the sons of wealthy families. He was no good at raising money and they ran rings around him, offering 1,000 yuan for every glass he drank. Xiaozhi, who barely drank at all, went at it recklessly for the sake of the tournament. All he remembers is that he left that day with more than 60,000 yuan, and that he was throwing up for days afterwards.

When it came to running the events, Xiaozhi organised everything and contacted every team himself. He poured enormous effort into CH3C, and the result was the opposite of what he wanted. Fewer and fewer people played it, and his strict enforcement of the rules offended a good many of them.

Two years of this came to nothing. Then he read the poem written by Yuan Chonghuan, the Ming dynasty general, wept, and gave up the game he loved most for good.

A lifetime of work has all come to nothing, half a life of renown lived out in a dream. After my death I need not fear a shortage of brave generals; my loyal soul will guard Liaodong still.

By 2012, broke and close to breaking down, Xiaozhi lost heart and planned to leave the scene altogether.

In the end, after repeated urging from a friend in Beijing surnamed Sun, he decided to come back and make League of Legends videos. That friend thought highly of Xiaozhi's comic style and believed he would be a great success in the new game.

So Xiaozhi put up his entire savings of 70 yuan. Yes, you read that correctly. That was his starting point in 2012. Together with the 3,000 yuan lent to him by Sun and another friend surnamed Yao, he bought a new computer for 2,600 yuan and set out on a new road, carrying a certain grim resolve along with everything life had taught him.

Today a single Xiaozhi video draws close to 20 million views across the major platforms. His Taobao shop sells clothing, peripherals, snacks, shoes and more, and its turnover doubles every year. In the autumn of 2014 he signed with the streaming site Douyu for an enormous sum and opened up two lines at once, video on demand and live interactive streaming. More people than ever will come to know Xiaozhi, and Chinese esports, through his casting.

Editor's note

After 2010, with the generation born in the 1980s reaching 30 and the generation born in the 1990s entering the workforce, Chinese esports culture began to spread out of the campuses and into society at large.

The esports audience was expanding rapidly and market demand was broadening with it. On top of the pressures of work and daily life, people needed lighter forms of entertainment to relax with. Out of that came the wave of entertainment in esports.

Some people welcomed that wave and some opposed it. I feel fortunate, because this is an era in which such a variety of people and cultures can burst out all at once, and in which there are so many ways to make money and build commercial models around them. That gives the future of esports almost unlimited possibilities.

The caster Xiaozhi is one small reflection of that wave of the times.