Chapter 40. The Life Choices of the Star Caster BBC

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 四十 名嘴BBC的人生选择

First published in the author's Zhihu column on January 3, 2016: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/20452813

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.

"You got hit with a belt as a kid, didn't you?" BBC asked, head down over his phone. "But have you ever been hit with an electrical cord?"

Then he looked up, fixed his big bright eyes on me and grinned, playful and a little resigned, like a laughing Buddha.

Every present moment of ours is the product of every choice we made in the past.

In January 2015, BBC, a veteran esports caster of 35, had a son. He says that on the day the boy was born he seemed calm to everyone around him, but inside he was cheering.

He told me, "I will never judge my son's education by his marks alone."

Because he suffered from exactly that himself.

BBC, real name Zhang Hongsheng, was born in Shanghai on July 7, 1980. His parents were zhiqing, educated young people sent down to the countryside, and were assigned to Tongling, Anhui province. They later joined the railway system and worked there all their lives.

So until his third year of junior high, BBC's schooling was all in Tongling. Between primary school and junior high he came first in his year at least ten times.

But he was not happy.

Because for the child he was then, an examination meant this: 100 in mathematics, one stroke of the belt for every mark short; at least 95 in Chinese, one stroke of the electrical cord for every mark short.

Between the beatings and the studying he had no choice. He was bright, fortunately, so the beatings were not frequent.

But the seed of rebellion had been planted.

On days without examinations, BBC preferred the company of the "bad students", the ones who liked to play and make trouble. Up the hills to shoot birds, down to the river to catch fish, anything that made a racket. What he did not like was being in charge of people. In his first year he was a brigade leader in the Young Pioneers, and his posts only got smaller after that. He is not made for politics, in his own words, so he stopped taking management roles altogether. At GamesTV and at ImbaTV today, where he is a co-founder, he has concentrated on making programmes and left the rest to colleagues.

Before senior high, BBC's teachers indulged him because he did so well. When the school broadcasting station was recruiting he thought the job looked impressive and signed up, and he read scripts there right through primary and junior high, which laid the groundwork for his later presenting work.

Meeting games

In 1989, in his third year of primary school, BBC ignored a cold, spent five hours at home hitting a table tennis ball against a wall and brought on acute myocarditis. He was sent to Shanghai and spent two months in hospital.

For those two months the adults were afraid of another scare, so nobody pushed him to study. For the first time in his life things slowed down. No examinations, no belt, and a relative even gave him a Transformers train robot that cost 45 yuan.

"It was one of those big Transformers with several layers nested inside each other. Forty-five yuan was a lot of money back then." BBC remembers it vividly.

But a stay in hospital always ends. Worried that he would fall behind once he was back, his family asked where he thought he would place in the next examination.

Emboldened by his recovery, BBC gathered his courage: "If I come first, will you buy me a games console?"

A Famicom in 1989 cost four or five hundred yuan, more than a month's wages, but his parents agreed.

And so the console he duly won planted another seed in him, the seed of games.

The pressure of the senior high entrance examination

BBC had been born in Shanghai, but a good university there meant first getting into a good senior high school there, and the cross-region examination was not his only problem.

His relatives in Shanghai had no room for him, so he needed a senior high school with boarding places.

Only four schools in Shanghai offered them: the high schools attached to Shanghai Jiao Tong University and to Fudan University, the Second High School Attached to East China Normal University, and Shanghai High School. Those were essentially the four highest entry marks in the city.

BBC says that examination was more pressure than the university entrance examination later on, because sitting the Shanghai papers meant he could not get back in time for the Tongling ones. Do badly and he would have nowhere to go. In the end he got into the one attached to Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Three years later, in 1998, BBC entered Shanghai Jiao Tong University to study mechanical engineering and manufacturing. He says the course was all about cars, and most of his classmates went on to Shanghai GM. He liked the subject well enough, yet he still felt lost. Pushed since childhood to do nothing but study, he had no real idea what he wanted from his life.

A first year of confusion and excitement

In the summer after the 1998 university entrance examination, BBC used a computer for the first time at his aunt's house and played his first RTS game, Red Alert 95. It opened up a new world.

Computers and internet cafés were spreading everywhere just then, and The Legend of Sword and Fairy, StarCraft, Baldur's Gate and many more games were pushed in front of him at once.

At university with nobody watching over him, BBC had finally found something he wanted to do, and he threw himself into it without restraint.

When Baldur's Gate came out he played it for five days and five nights straight, resting for two hours in the middle. On the way back to his dormitory he was swaying as he walked.

With three classmates he also founded the Shanghai Jiao Tong University StarCraft team. Many well-known figures came out of it, including Zhou Hao, known as Zax, founder of Replays.net and WE, who was a year below BBC.

Running that free, though, he was bound to trip.

Jiao Tong had a strict rule: fail three courses and you repeat the year. BBC, who had hardly attended a class, duly repeated it. That should have been warning enough, yet in his second attempt at the first year he failed three courses again, and under the rules he was expelled and went home without a degree.

BBC looked ashamed telling me this. He says that because he had been unsure about his future anyway, changing direction did not bother him much. What bothered him was letting his family down. Money at home was tight, and putting him through university had used up much of their savings.

Two roads were open to him now: find a job, or repeat the final year and sit the university entrance examination again.

He tried both. He had never handed back his student card when he left Jiao Tong, and on the strength of it he tutored secondary school pupils, two hours a session. Six months of that earned him more than 4,000 yuan.

With the money he bought himself a set of clothes, paid 2,000 yuan for a place on a crammer course, gave the rest to his mother and went back to studying.

The university entrance examination is a lifelong nightmare for a great many people. Even now, when I am under real pressure, I dream at night that I am sitting in the examination hall staring at a paper packed with questions I have not revised for.

In 2001, three years after his first attempt, BBC sat in that hall again. This was a nightmare that was actually happening, and he was far more nervous than the first time.

He applied for financial management at Fudan University and missed the mark by one point. He was reassigned to clinical medicine at Fudan's medical school, a seven-year combined bachelor's and master's programme that would leave him a qualified doctor. It sounded reasonable enough.

BBC did not like the subject, but he had no other option, so he went ahead.

In an anatomy class in his first year, BBC noticed that his hands shook. Not from fear or excitement: it was a physical trait that ran in the family, and it meant he might not be suited to surgery.

Just then Warcraft III appeared. It required fewer actions than StarCraft and reached a wider audience, and BBC, who had loved RTS games all along, started playing again. He soon reached level 42 on the Korean battle.net server, which was no small achievement.

On one side was medicine, which he neither liked nor suited. On the other were games, which he liked and suited.

The seed planted in his childhood seemed to have found soil to root in. The lesson of Jiao Tong, though, made him more careful about keeping his priorities straight.

Then, in his fifth year, he could hold out no longer.

In 2005, BBC reached that fifth year, when the rules required him to train in a hospital. The work was highly regular, roll call at seven in the morning and out at four, and it made him miserable.

Because since 2003 he had been running Haofang's Warcraft III subsite, and people had been putting him forward as a part-time caster at Warcraft III tournaments. He worked on everything in that period, from offline events to Hong Cheng Shijian, a games programme on the Shanghai Sports Channel.

That was where he found a happiness he had not felt for a long time.

In 2005, Zhang Zhexi, known as Yaomo, a director on Hong Cheng Shijian and now one of the partners at ImbaTV, invited BBC to join GamesTV once it was founded. There was one condition: full-time. The volume of programming was heavy, and BBC as a presenter had to be available at any moment.

Once again a choice about his life was in front of him.

On one side, a doctor's day from seven to four. On the other, esports presenting, which was far from secure at the time.

And full-time presenting meant giving up his hospital placement, which meant once again not graduating.

It also meant that all those strokes of the belt and the electrical cord taken for the sake of marks, all the expectations of his family and relatives, all those years of swallowing his pride, would count for nothing.

If it were you, what would you choose?

BBC says, "I thought about it for maybe ten minutes, then I said yes to Yaomo."

The seed that longed for freedom sprouted and broke through the soil.

This was probably the first time BBC chose his own life for himself. What awaited him was a certificate of completion from Fudan University's medical school rather than a degree.

And also WCG 2005, which he cast with Lao Yang. That was the first time China carried pictures from the WCG world finals live through a P2P streaming platform, and the moment Sky, Li Xiaofeng of the Chinese club WE, took his first world championship. He and his colleagues set a record of 250,000 people watching online.

Painful and joyful at the same time, as the saying goes.

Ten years on, I asked BBC whether he had any regrets.

He says he is very happy now, but that it was hard going, with several difficult stages.

2008 above all, when GamesTV was broken up. Of a team of nearly a hundred, only six went back to the television station. Salaries fell from 4,000 yuan to 3,000 while the work expanded: those six had to carry the whole channel.

That period was pretty grim, BBC says. All at once he had lost both direction and security, and if the station had not taken him in he would not have known what else he could do.

The hardship was not only mental. It was material too.

BBC met the woman who is now his wife around then. She had no job, and out of his 3,000 yuan a month, 1,600 went on rent and 300 on cigarettes, leaving 1,100 for the two of them. They often bought one bowl of old duck vermicelli soup and two steamed flower rolls. She ate the soup, and he dipped the rolls in the broth.

At this point BBC smiled slyly and asked whether that counted as a marriage forged in hardship.

In 2009, GamesTV began joint operations with browser game companies. Nobody had expected that online games, the thing esports had once despised most, would become both a lifeline for many esports organisations and the source of the first real money in esports.

That year BBC's salary went up to 8,000 yuan, and the two years that followed were finally a little easier.

The pity, BBC says, was that once the company grew, the drawbacks of a state-owned enterprise began to show.

No proper incentive for talent, no early investment in projects, high work targets. All of that left people no room to innovate, and made even the existing content hard to sustain.

Stay or leave? They went back and forth about it internally for years.

On June 6, 2014, six esports veterans who had worked together since the GamesTV days, among them Yaomo, BBC, 117 and Haitao, left to start a new company, ImbaTV. A new choice, and a new gamble.

BBC says he plays much less since his son was born. He gets up at seven to work out, streams on his personal channel from nine until one in the afternoon, then goes to the office to deal with things, and in the evening presents the company's live programmes until ten.

It is tiring, but he is happy.

The life choices of the star caster BBC.