Chapter 36. Alone, One of the First Casters in Chinese Esports

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 三十六 中国电竞解说元老Alone

First published in the author's Zhihu column on February 20, 2015: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19919216

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.

Someone once asked Alone, who also goes by Erlong and was one of the first esports casters in China, how he felt about new casters earning more than he does by drinking water on stream and wearing thongs.

Alone said he sees nothing wrong with esports turning towards entertainment. Whatever exists exists for a reason. It is early days, and the industry has its share of disorder, but it will settle down in time. With so much being tried at once, we need room for all of it, and new things need time to take shape rather than being dismissed. Even so, there is a limit, and finding it is something we have to do together.

Alone's real name is Liu Qing. He took Erlong as his courtesy name and gave himself the sobriquet China ToP Zerg. He was born on October 20, 1980, in Shengze, a town in Suzhou. It is a prosperous place that has made silk since ancient times, but Liu Qing's family was ordinary, and his talent for games was nothing special either.

Sitting the college entrance examination, Alone wanted to get out and see the country, so he put nothing but northern universities on his form. He ended up at Jilin University.

In 1999, as the internet took hold in China, Alone came across StarCraft and QQ at the same time. All at once the world felt much bigger. He liked the feeling, and made a lot of friends.

The StarCraft scene in the Northeast was intense and full of strong players. Jilin University had a team of its own, and Alone trained hard to get into it. Once the team started playing outside opponents, though, it hardly ever won. Probably because Alone was on it.

Alone graduated in 2002 and went back to Shanghai, where he signed up on a whim for GOC, a fairly well known domestic tournament. Remarkably, he beat zealot, the deputy captain of SVS, then the strongest team in Shanghai. Everyone at SVS was stunned. SVS was one of the top three teams in China, and zealot was their best player and the national runner-up at WCG.

That evening SVS went out for dinner, and the captain, UFO, and the manager, Friend, whose real name is Chen Qidong, asked Alone along. Seven or eight SVS people talked and laughed around the table. Alone did not know any of them, and nobody spoke to him.

Just as it was becoming unbearable, a plate of twice-cooked pork was set down in front of him. He picked up his chopsticks, lifted a piece of the meat and was about to eat when Friend, who had not said a word all evening, suddenly asked whether he wanted to join SVS.

Alone's first thought was that if he said no, he might not get to eat that piece of pork.

So he grunted his agreement, and that was how he entered the esports industry.

There is a verse for it. Step into esports and it is as deep as the sea, and from that day on your scruples are a stranger to you.

Alone's results as a player were poor after that, so he gradually became a team leader instead. He led SVS to several national online titles, which convinced Friend that he had a real talent for organisation and management.

One day in 2002, Friend called Alone into his office. The biggest problem in Chinese esports, he said, was the absence of any strong organisation, which was why cheating at tournaments went unpoliced and prize money went unpaid. Would Alone be willing to build a players' guild with him to deal with it?

Alone agreed, and so the China Player Union, CPU for short, came into being.

The name may sound like a joke, but Alone and the others were entirely serious about it. The first job Alone took on after it was founded was drafting the charter.

He spent a whole week reading charters from other industries first.

Once the charter was written, Alone went with Friend to the Shanghai municipal government to register the guild officially. The officials listened and were completely baffled. How many people does this guild of yours have, one of them finally asked. Tens of thousands online, Alone said.

And that was the end of that.

As the comedian Guo Degang says, what was bitter at the time turns into a joke when you tell it later.

The esports people of that period really were searching, in complete seriousness, for a way forward.

Hitting a wall at the government did not stop them. They did go after tournaments that failed to pay their prize money, and drew up a standard set of competition rules for StarCraft.

In 2003 in particular, Samsung moved the StarCraft and FIFA events at WCG online. The players' guild argued that running them online left too many problems unsolved: cheating, players fielding ringers, disconnections. WCG was close to sacred for Chinese players then, and nobody would tolerate the slightest flaw in it, so the guild gathered more than a hundred teams and several thousand people behind a joint petition and delivered it to Samsung's China office in person.

Nothing changed.

Over time Alone and the others found that CPU had nowhere near enough influence to hold other organisations to anything. The tie was a weak one, and if the other side ignored them there was nothing they could do. The esports environment could not be changed that way.

So they changed course. To have a voice of their own and more weight behind it they would have to build both, and they turned to an esports website and their own tournament, SIM, the forerunner of the PLU series.

Their thinking then was fairly simple. Make themselves an authoritative esports outlet, then use the force of public opinion to bring order to the industry.

That was what a lot of esports websites were thinking in those years: regulate esports from the media side.

With that in mind, Alone and his colleagues tried every new distribution technology they could find. Early on they produced a large volume of first-hand match reports in text and photographs, and experimented with live audio broadcasts. In 2004, when streaming platforms had only just appeared and the PPS client had barely 300 users online across all platforms, Oldman, PLU's engineer, was already working with Lunzi of PPS on using P2P technology for live broadcasting.

When the SIM grand final came round in 2004, more than 9,000 people watched it online. Esports was feeling its way forward one step at a time.

In 2005, CPU was renamed PLU, and Alone appeared on camera as a caster for the first time, at GamesTV. Until then An Jia and Friend had been on camera, with the feed cutting to the voices of Alone and Friend once a match began.

Alone says PLU got through its first few years without any income at all, on the enthusiasm of a handful of shareholders. As it grew, the load grew with it. In 2006 it broadcast 80 per cent of the world's well known tournaments and started producing original programming of its own.

On the revenue side there was nothing beyond the occasional sponsor. All the attention PLU had built up around StarCraft and Warcraft III could not be turned into money, and that was the problem.

In 2007 PLU's cash ran out. Nobody was paid for eight months, and two thirds of the staff left.

Alone's family was in Shanghai, so his daily outgoings came to the underground fare and his meals, but the pressure at home was enormous.

His mother could not take it one day and said, "You work more than ten hours a day. Other people earn over ten thousand and you earn two thousand?" There was resentment in it, and love too.

They say people only find a way through once there is no way back. You do what you are forced to do.

To stay alive, the dozen or so people left at PLU looked for new ways to survive. Working with China Telecom, they launched a high definition OB card: 15 yuan a month for PLU's high definition programming. On nothing but the goodwill of players, it brought in ten or twenty thousand yuan a month.

They sold mechanical keyboards under the name PLU Mechanical Storm. To promote them they made a great many videos explaining what a mechanical keyboard was, hammering the point about durability, staying clear of the saturated membrane keyboard market and opening up a new one.

They also took on the joint operation of a browser game called Xingji Diguo, or Star Empire, which became PLU's largest source of income from then on.

Before they started, the manager in charge of the game told PLU it could make 100,000 yuan a month. Alone was taken aback. A hundred thousand? How many high definition OB cards would he have to sell for that?

It turned out the browser game really could make a lot of money. Alone was struck by it: "Our lot spent half our lives on esports, and in the end the thing that made money for us was a browser game."

Browser games make money, but rarely for long. The company's finances were just about improving, yet they still had to prepare for a long fight.

So in 2011 PLU moved to Wuxi, where a development zone could offer favourable policies and support. It later moved to Taicang at the invitation of the local government.

Alone says the years of work on the market were starting to pay off by then. People born in the 1980s were rising into positions in government and business, and made it much easier for their parents' generation to accept esports, which brought a great deal of commercial money with it.

After the move to Taicang, things kept getting better. PLU ran a lot of large events, and hosting TGA in particular put the company on a proper footing, with the team's experience and size both growing fast.