Chapter 43. Esports' First Woman Club Owner: RuRu, Pan Jie

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 四十三 电竞第一女老板 RuRu潘婕

First published in the author's Zhihu column on February 20, 2017: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/25198233

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.

RuRu laughed as she said it. "Over Chinese New Year, even a lot of my relatives and elders started calling me the Empress Dowager. They have no idea where the nickname came from, and they say it so warmly that I did not know whether to laugh or cry."

She made fun of herself while she ordered, and most of what she ordered was spicy.

This was the third time I had seen her in a month. She had not worn make-up once. She dressed casually, was small and thin, and wore a straight fringe with her hair down to her shoulders. She lit up whenever the conversation turned to esports, waving her chopsticks about, and at the table she leant forward with her head propped on one hand.

"I have been busy negotiating with a game operator, and with a new funding round for the LGD club. I have not eaten all day, so forgive me," she said between mouthfuls. She was clearly hungry.

If I did not know her, I would have found it hard to see that this was the head of an internet company valued at close to 600 million yuan, and the holder of several titles that carry real weight in esports: owner of the LGD esports club, founder of VPgame, and founder of CDEC, the China Dota Elite Community.

In any industry, the competition at the core is brutal.

Chinese professional esports is almost entirely a man's world. RuRu is not the child of an official or the child of a wealthy family. She came up as an artist and a front-end developer and worked her way to where she is now, and she began by taking over the wreckage left behind when a club owner walked out on his team. Her ability is acknowledged across the scene, and Wang Sicong has invested in her company.

Even so, RuRu's immaturity as a manager is also plain in her temperament.

"My biggest mistake was putting myself out in front. But I had no choice," RuRu said, sounding resigned.

In recent years she has been attacked viciously over employment disputes between clubs and players, and because she is a woman there has also been a great deal of personal abuse and gossip about her private life.

At first she could not understand the change. "In the days when esports was so hard, everybody supported everybody else. Now that life is better, people spend all day tearing each other apart. You are doing the work, and you are treated as the villain."

Someone even modelled an article on the history of the Eight-Nation Alliance invasion of China and called her the Empress Dowager of Esports, mocking her forcefulness and her need for control.

RuRu said: "I used to be a very emotional person. I could not stand people saying things that were not true, so I was always arguing with them head-on online. Then I found that the more I tried to correct them, the more convinced they became that it was all true. It was not until the middle of 2016, when I was simply too busy with the company, that I really managed to let it go."

Growing up an extreme Virgo

RuRu, whose real name is Pan Jie, was born on September 12, 1986, into the family of a construction worker in Nantong, Jiangsu. An extreme Virgo met an equally extreme mother.

From the start, her mother's approach to raising Pan Jie was simple. Anything less than first place earned a beating, in any subject.

"My mother is a very forceful person. She even wanted a say in what my boyfriends looked like. I look very like her and my character is very like hers too. The worst thing about my childhood was that I could not be first at everything," Pan Jie said, teasing herself as she talked about her early years.

She came first every time the school ran a blackboard newspaper. Her boards were not only drawn. They were blown on.

"Once I designed a gardenia theme. Ordinary chalk drawing could not give me the effect I wanted, so I bought the best chalk I could find and ground it into powder. I cut flower shapes out of paper as stencils, laid them over the board, and blew the powder on one flower at a time. Then I outlined them and drew the leaves and the stems, so the flowers came out in relief, bright and three-dimensional," Pan Jie recalled.

Other pupils worked on the blackboard after class. She stayed at school on her own through the night.

Her appetite for the spotlight and her insistence on being first at everything also made her a target. She was once voted the most disliked person in her class in an anonymous ballot, although she had meant nobody any harm.

"I moved to a new class once, and everybody voted anonymously on everybody else. I was voted the person people disliked most. So I went and talked to every single one of them, and after a term they knew me and we got on very well."

Pan Jie loved drawing from an early age. All through junior high she travelled alone to the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou during the holidays to find professors who would teach her.

In her final year of high school she placed 17th in the studio examination for the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, and her score in the national college entrance examination was more than twice the admission line. She was the only candidate admitted from Jiangsu province, and she went to Wuhan to study fashion design at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts.

A very strange university life

"When I think now about some of the things I did at university, I feel like a complete oddball. Even I cannot understand it," Pan Jie said, growing a little animated about the past.

In the autumn of 2004, on her first day at university, Pan Jie was a thousand miles from her mother and finally free. She did a great many things that day.

The class went round introducing themselves one by one. Everybody else said a couple of sentences and sat down.

Pan Jie got up, recited a long poem she had written about herself, then sang and danced her way through the whole of Jolin Tsai's "Love's 36 Stratagems". It went on for more than ten minutes and left the room stunned. For the next four years her classmates called her 36 Stratagems.

She turned up late for the dance troupe's recruitment day, after it had already finished, and insisted the teacher stay behind. She improvised a routine in front of everyone, stunned the room again, and joined the troupe.

Why was she late? Because that same day she had also joined the campus radio station, the arts troupe, the fiction society, the poetry society and several others.

By the evening, when everybody else was ready to sleep, her energy was only beginning. She was going to an internet café to play games all night. She had been waiting a long time to do that.

That night she opened and tried every game in the café, one after another, until she opened Warcraft III.

"How can there be a game this good in the world? And how can I be losing?" A Virgo's mind really does work differently. Pan Jie spent the whole night losing to the easy computer, and it shocked her.

"I think I went a bit mad. Apart from lectures and sleep, I was in the internet café playing WAR3 all night. When I could not win, I read guides and watched replays, and then I played again."

That is how Pan Jie went from losing to one easy computer to beating three insane computers. She also met a group of semi-professional WAR3 players from Wuhan University of Technology at that café, and that was the beginning of her connection to esports.

Aconcagua.Rurutia.Asuka

That was Pan Jie's full name in game. Aconcagua is the name of a volcano. Rurutia is a Japanese singer, and her song "Lost Butterfly" became Pan Jie's picture of her own life, since she had loved butterflies since she was small. Asuka was a name given to her by a WAR3 player.

"I love how blind and wilful and brief a butterfly is. My QQ nickname has been Diewu Pianxian, butterflies dancing in flight, since junior high. Then the first question in my college entrance examination was how to pronounce the characters pianxian, and every classmate who knew me got it right."

A volcano, a butterfly and WAR3. Pan Jie had picked a handle that summed up where she was at the time.

"In the end everyone thought my handle was too much trouble to say, so they just called me RuRu." Pan Jie still looked indignant about it.

RuRu, with energy to spare

Besides all the society activities and a campus forum she built to mark up the key points for exams, in 2004, as a first-year student, RuRu still had the energy to start a business of her own: building company websites for other people. She had no idea it would become the foundation of her later career in esports.

RuRu had the advantage of her art training, and she had taught herself front-end development. The sites she built stood out, and she charged very little. Where others quoted 10,000 yuan for a company website, she asked for 2,000 and included maintenance, which brought in a stream of orders from small and medium-sized companies.

"I could not do back-end development, but there was plenty of open-source code for complete sites online. Once I got used to it I could build a site in a day on my own. I even rented a server, so I could handle everything for them, domain registration, server setup and the rest."

RuRu's reputation among small businesses grew quickly, and word of mouth brought her a large group of clients in 2005: Shanghai Buyecheng, the famous mobile phone mall.

She explained: "Buyecheng started out in mobile phone wholesale and was moving from wholesale to retail. To do retail you need your own brand and your own traffic, so they needed their own websites and their own content. I saw the opening, and I even designed a menu of modular services and sent it to them. Whatever function they wanted, with a price beside it, they just ticked the box."

Anyone who has been to that mall knows how densely packed the phone shops are. RuRu's business went through the roof. She opened one site after another, and she brought in her younger brother, then studying at Fudan University, to provide long-term content maintenance for those sites, which was another income stream.

"I love buying things for my brother. Clothes, computers, food, everyday things, his tuition, I paid for all of it. His classmates thought he was the son of a rich family." RuRu seems to have been born with a certain maternal force.

At the same time, the rise of Dota made RuRu more and more enthusiastic about esports. Wuhan had been a city with a strong esports atmosphere since the StarCraft era, and she came to know more and more talented players. In those days everybody was poor and nothing was professional, so she often went to the internet café and bought everyone chicken drumsticks.

"When I see someone in trouble I cannot stop myself from helping. I do not know why. It has cost me a lot, and it has also given me a lot of friends."

The Russian team Rush3D changed RuRu's life

In 2007 the strong Russian Dota team Rush3D was invited to China for a series of exhibition matches. The roster included Vigoss, known as the king of ganking, and PGG, who was called the best one-on-one player in the world. RuRu watched that team beat its way from one end of China to the other, collect enough prize money and attention, and stroll away. Among the beaten were many of her own friends in Wuhan, and it made her furious.

"I wanted to put a team together right then. I did not believe we could not beat them. But I did not have enough money or resources, and I did not understand how the esports business worked. So I packed a bag and went to Shanghai to look for a chance to learn."

The way RuRu found a job was strange as well.

After arriving in Shanghai she looked up which company ran WCG in China, found that it was NeoTV, learned that the WCG director was called Wang Jue, found the address and marched straight into the NeoTV office. She told the receptionist she had an appointment with Wang Jue.

The receptionist did not know any better and passed the message on. As it happened, Wang Jue was hiring. He thought nothing of it and agreed to see RuRu, and the two of them talked for four or five hours. Director Wang decided this young woman was a good sort, enthusiastic about esports and with real professional skills, so he kept her on.

NeoTV offered a salary of 2,800 yuan for video packaging and website design.

That was how she found the job.

RuRu was only in her third year and had not graduated. She was very clear that she had not come for the salary. During the day she absorbed everything she could about the work in front of and behind the camera. After work she carried on building websites for people, earning money to build up a fund for a team.

"I grew a great deal in my two years at NeoTV, especially in what I learned about the work behind the scenes. I lived through how the whole WCG competition was run in China and how the various video programmes were made, and that helped me enormously." RuRu is grateful for that period.

RuRu had not forgotten why she came to Shanghai. At the end of 2007, six months after joining NeoTV, she used the savings from years of website work to rent a duplex villa in Baoshan and founded the 7L team. The name 7L came from Qilianwang, the company that had been giving RuRu website work at the time.

The 7L roster: LongDD, Burning, PD, Danche and DGC

Anyone who knows Dota will recognise this as a formidable line-up even today. Burning, the bearded one, later became known in the Dota scene as B God, and LongDD and the others all became pillars of Chinese Dota.

In 2007, though, Dota was only beginning to take off, and life was not good for them.

Before 7L was founded, Burning had been on the Shanghai team CaNt, but CaNt could not hold on any longer because of money problems, and several of the players were looking for a way out.

RuRu offered Burning a salary of 3,000 yuan. That may not sound like much now, but it was the highest in the industry at the time, especially when there were hardly any Dota tournaments with prize money at all.

She put them into three months of closed training and forbade anyone to enter any competition. Apart from her own job, she spent all her time watching over their practice.

"In March 2008 Rush3D came back for another payday. We took our chance and made our name overnight. We beat them three days running in practice matches. 7L was called the pride of Chinese Dota, and it made a lot of Chinese players start to feel that CNDota was strong too." RuRu is proud of that.

From 2007 to 2009, 7L was the only Chinese team that could stand up to Rush3D. In 2009 in particular, 7L beat Rush3D, by then renamed PS, at the Tianyi Cup. In an era when everyone assumed European teams were untouchable, that gave Chinese fans a great deal of confidence and encouraged many new players to join the journey towards a Dota world title.

The financial crisis of 2008 shattered RuRu's dream. In that depression, when every manufacturer feared for its own survival, RuRu watched her savings burn away completely. With no way of making money, 7L fell into difficulty and infighting.

"Keeping 7L going cost around 30,000 yuan a month. Before the crisis I worked during the day and built websites at night, and I could support the team. After the crisis the website orders simply stopped. Even when I dropped my price to 500 yuan for a site, I could not get a single order."

RuRu began to realise that a model where money only went out could not last. Two months of unpaid salaries left the players unhappy, and just as she reached the end of her resources she found a new sponsor. But she did not want to continue in that unhealthy way.

So RuRu proposed to the players that future prize money be split fifty-fifty. The players rejected it firmly. They would accept only an eight-two split, with the team taking two tenths, which left RuRu feeling both wronged and angry.

"I had already given them the best salaries and the best training environment of the time. I had put so much into it and I was exhausted every day. All I wanted was for the club to survive and to develop in a healthy way. Not only did they not understand, they attacked me. I was truly angry, so I refused that split outright and did not even want to speak to them."

The talks broke down. Everyone except DGC left, and 7L, a team that could have become a legend, disappeared from history.

Looking back at that episode, RuRu regrets it. She feels she handled it far too rigidly, and that many things could have been settled by sitting down and talking again.

"If I had been able to stay calm and lay out every month's income and spending, I think it could have been negotiated. Unfortunately I was too angry. I felt I had worked so hard and been betrayed for it, so I cut off communication. That was very immature." There is real regret in her voice.

The failure of 7L set RuRu thinking along new lines. She realised that raising the standard of Chinese Dota could not be done with one team. It needed a platform that could raise the standard of everyone.

The birth of CDEC

CDEC was founded on June 22, 2009. Its full name is China Dota Elite Community. Many people who do not play Dota may not know that the core of CDEC is a matchmaking program. Its purpose was to let players use the fragments of time they had, start a high-level match whenever they wanted, and greatly increase the amount of practice they got, so that the standard of Chinese Dota players would rise.

"Professional teams used to practise by having their managers arrange matches by hand. But there were very few strong teams willing to play you, and getting two high-level best-of-threes in a day was already rare. When you could not find a team, everybody's time was wasted. I built CDEC so that professional players could have matches to play at any time and any place, with sides assigned by individual record. Players from different clubs were mixed together, so there was no need to worry about hiding your tactics, and you could test your own ideas freely."

Put simply, CDEC was the ladder, or the solo ranked system, of its era.

The system originally ran on the rating system that the IHPA alliance had built on the GG platform, but its functions were very limited. RuRu approached Zhou Xiongfeng, a friend she knew in technical circles, and asked him to help improve it.

Zhou Xiongfeng's name means little to the general public, but in information security he is very well known. He is a member of the famous Chinese hacker group 0x557, was Alibaba's 24th employee, and is one of the senior technical figures behind the Pangu jailbreak.

He introduced his student Darkmage to help RuRu. Darkmage decompiled QQ and spent three days writing QQBOT, a QQ robot that could run automatic matchmaking, rating tables, league promotion and relegation and other functions inside a QQ group. La0wang, another of the 0x557 people, provided the server support, and RuRu built the front-end community.

In the early days of CDEC a player only had to register on the forum with a QQ number, join the CDEC QQ group and type the command to apply for a match. QQBOT would take nine other players of a similar standard, split them into two sides, set up a server and give you the password. You opened the game and joined the match.

After the game the system scored you on your performance, and it could score you separately according to the position you played. It also had a captain rating. Once everyone had voted for a captain, the system recorded that player's leadership, which gave clubs data to refer to when they were looking for talent.

Anyone who reached the top ten of a CDEC season was a leader among the very strongest players.

On the competitive side, CDEC set up a tiered league structure with a Masters league, an Elite league and a Reserve league. Newcomers started in the lowest league and moved up according to their points and their results. Points were cleared every two weeks and the leagues started again, so everyone had a chance.

RuRu said: "The system was very popular as soon as it appeared, and it greatly increased the amount of practice Chinese professional Dota players got. But the weakness was obvious. Since it had been built by decompiling QQ, it was not very stable, and it dropped out every night at two or three in the morning. Everyone would ring me, and I would get up and restart the server remotely."

Over the following years, to make the system more stable and easier to use, RuRu put together a dedicated team to rewrite the CDEC program. Players could now do through a web page everything they had done before, and the data was much clearer as well. That became today's VPgame. The road in between was full of twists, but there is no space for it here.

How did RuRu join LGD?

In 2010 Wu Sheng, better known as 2009, came to RuRu and said a friend of his wanted a full visual identity design for a club. RuRu agreed at once. She had been designing logos for teams since 2004, more than ten of them, including an early DK logo, so this was familiar ground.

"I remember this person had a great many requirements, and he insisted on sending them over MSN. To meet his requirements I even went and studied printing technology, though it was really only business cards and things like that. I finished it in the end, sent it to him, and then put it out of my mind."

RuRu went on: "A few months later 2009 suddenly got in touch and said that person had forgotten to pay me for the design, and asked how much it was. I said not to bother, it was a small thing. Then 2009 told me the person was the owner of the LGD team. Then that person came and asked whether I would like to be LGD's team manager, and I said yes."

That was how RuRu became LGD's manager, with no salary at all, while doing almost everything behind the scenes: finance, media, even running a Taobao shop.

At that point RuRu had just moved from Guangzhou to Tianjin, where LGD were based, and joined an advertising and media company. She did advertising during the day and LGD's work at night, running the Taobao shop alone, selling LGD T-shirts that she designed, made, photographed and shipped herself. To get a better printed finish on the shirts, she even studied various kinds of printing machinery.

None of that was the hard part. The worst of it was that every month RuRu had to go round asking for money like a beggar.

LGD's owner was not the man putting up the money. His friends were, and one of them was the son of the man who had bought the Lao Gan Die chilli sauce brand. Every month the owner would give RuRu a few names, and RuRu would go and follow those people around asking for money.

"It was humiliating. You follow them while they eat, you follow them while they walk, you follow them everywhere, you wait outside their door. There was nothing else to be done. The team had no money for wages. The Taobao shop made 5,000 yuan a month at the absolute most." RuRu looked helpless as she described those days.

"Then iG came poaching, and YYF, Chuan, CH and 830 left. The club was down to ZSMJ and me. Honestly, we deserved to be picked apart. I had the contracts ready and the owner would not sign the players himself." There is exasperation in RuRu's voice.

Two days later, while RuRu was in the shower at home, the tempered glass panel in the bathroom shattered. She was hit by countless fragments and cut all over, and the wounds on her leg alone took more than ten stitches. One misfortune followed another.

ZSMJ did bring several new members into LGD after that, and the roster became:

xiao8, YAO, ZSMJ, DDC and DD

LGD's run of bad luck was not over.

Shortly before Chinese New Year in 2011 the owner suddenly disappeared. The company's accounts were more than 47,000 yuan in the red. RuRu had covered three months of wages herself and had no money left, and everyone had still been hoping for the year-end bonus the owner had promised.

RuRu was back in the position she had been in with 7L, and this time she was injured all over and could barely move. But this time she did not give up on communication.

"I made a very beautiful sponsorship deck and put everything I had learned about rate cards at the advertising company into it. Then I rang endless companies for sponsorship. Drinks companies, food companies, anything with a bit of a name, even the marketing department of Sany Heavy Industry. The strangest part was that I found the private phone number of Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360, in a pile of hacker databases, and I got through."

RuRu chased every chance to keep LGD from dissolving. None of those calls came to anything, but she still did not give up, and at the beginning of 2012, on the verge of collapse, she reached an agreement with Taobao Games.

Along the way RuRu turned down sponsorship from a number of wealthy young men, because she had seen for herself what happened when a rich owner got drunk and insisted on playing a match.

"He picked Shadow Fiend in the mid lane and went zero kills and more than ten deaths, and nobody dared say a word. It was an important online match, too. I decided that model was far too unreliable," RuRu said angrily.

"After I got the Taobao Games sponsorship, I asked the LGD players whether they would come to Hangzhou with me. I had no confidence when I asked, because what I could offer was not very good. But everyone came to Hangzhou with me, and I am still deeply grateful for it." RuRu raised both thumbs, moved by the memory.

On the night LGD went out of WDC in the top eight, ZSMJ came to xiao8 with red eyes and said his heart was no longer in it and that he planned to take a break.

In 2012, after ZSMJ suddenly left, RuRu bought Sylar from WE on a 4+1 deal, with 50,000 yuan to be paid if the team won a title within six months, and put together a powerful roster. LGD shone at TI2, taking seventeen wins in a row into the winners' bracket final. Unfortunately they made a string of elementary mistakes in a decisive game, lost the match and lost their composure with it, and finished only third. A great shame.

In 2014 xiao8 suddenly left for NB, the contracts of the other players expired, and only YAO was left. Almost the whole esports scene assumed LGD was about to dissolve.

"Even the streaming platform we worked with thought we were finished, and the contract we were in the middle of signing was never posted back to us. I went everywhere to borrow money. I even went through all eighteen of Alibaba's founders. I wanted to sign a few players again. Sylar had already gone to another team by then, but his form in those years was among the best in the world, so I decided to sign him at a high price."

In the autumn of 2014, when streaming platforms had only just appeared, RuRu wanted to sign Sylar for 700,000 yuan on a two-year contract. Sylar thought two years was too long and wanted only one.

"So each side gave way and we signed for a year and a half. I paid him the 700,000 in a single payment, and a renewal would have been a million. In March 2016 Sylar said he would leave after the Asian Championship, which was exactly when the year-and-a-half contract ended, so we hurried to find a player to replace him. Then, after the tournament, Sylar wanted to stay after all. We had already found someone, so he was furious and posted on Weibo that he was going to expose my private life." RuRu sounded resigned.

RuRu, Pan Jie, esports' first woman club owner.