Witness Account: Xiong Jianming (Neo), Former General Manager of NeoTV, in His Own Words

A witness account collected for ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 当事人篇 NeoTV前总经理熊剑明Neo亲述

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 23, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19621437

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.

A note from the editor, BBKinG. After I published Chapter 8 of The History Behind Chinese Esports, NeoTV and PLU: A Tale of Grudges, the piece drew attention from every direction, and the people who had lived through those events in particular came forward one after another with their own views. I have collected and organised them here. I need to state clearly that everything in this piece has been confirmed by the person who supplied the information. I exist only as someone putting a history in order, and since everyone's angle and experience differ, there are bound to be errors and omissions. At the same time I have no interest in praising or condemning anybody. That is not why I write this series, and I hope readers will understand.

Readers should note, though, that some of what the people involved say in their own accounts may carry obvious subjective feeling and self-interest. It is worth reading these accounts against one another and judging for yourself.

What follows is the account of Xiong Jianming, known as Neo, the former general manager of NeoTV. He sent me written permission by email to publish it. Apart from paragraph formatting and a few punctuation marks, I have left it essentially untouched.

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By Xiong Jianming (Neo)

I read BBKinG's blog and a great many scenes came back to me. I do not know BBKinG, but he writes well, even though a lot of the detail about NeoTV is wrong.

Before I knew it, five years have passed since I left esports. If I do not write some of these memories down soon, I will forget them myself.

1. How I came to esports and to GamesTV

The first line BBKinG uses to introduce me is: "In 2005, Xiong Jianming, known as Neo, who came from a television background..." That much is right. But everything I made in television was games content, and I have been saying to friends for years that I may have been the first person in China to put esports on a screen.

At the end of 2002, at 23, I gave up a comfortable, well-paid job at the state-owned enterprises Xinhua News Agency and China Telecom, took a pay cut and started a business with one other person. His name was Huang Hao. We made a television programme called You Dian Feng Kuang, which went out every Friday on the Lifestyle channel of Shanghai Television. Alongside general games news and features, it had a regular slot called the CS Television Championship.

At the time the programme's ratings in Shanghai were consistently in the top three among general-interest programmes, so much so that in 2003 it set off a Counter-Strike craze across the city and packed out the internet cafés. Shanghai gamers over 30 should still remember that show.

"The first person to put esports on a screen"

When we started the programme, the only other one around was You Xi Dong Xi on the Travel Channel satellite station, and that was still only covering video game news. I never saw any others. CCTV's Esports World did not go on the air until nearly a year later. By then we had already run television competitions such as the CS Television Championship and the FIFA Television Championship. The pity of it is that our programme's influence never reached beyond Shanghai.

Zhu Zhen and Zhu Liye, both presenters at Shanghai Media Group, worked on the show. Another presenter was Zhang Rui, known as Da Xia, and the Counter-Strike casters were Wu Qiang and Feiying.

Anyone from GamesTV will find those names familiar. All of them were part of the group that started GamesTV when SiTV set it up.

So why did I not join GamesTV? At that point the production company was three people: me, Huang Hao and the producer Chen Lanlan. Zhang Rui was an intern and Wu Qiang had a job of his own. I left the programme in 2004, because the producer would not put the money we had made back into growing the business and used it to buy a flat instead. I was handling content planning, scripts, directing, camera work, post-production and effects all at once, and occasionally presenting as well. I walked out of that company in a fit of anger.

The real scoop. Wang Han, the biggest name at Hunan Satellite Television, came close to hosting an esports programme.

I had always wanted to take games programming out of a narrow niche and into a mass entertainment market. That was the other reason I left: I had found a better investor. At the end of 2003 we built a studio of more than 1,000 square metres on Caoyang Road, and I planned a programme called Dian Wan Xing Dong. (image) It was an hour-long show that turned esports into a variety programme. For the pilot we brought in the television actor Sun Xing, Qi Hong, then a footballer in the national side, and others. The idea was to use star appeal to make games programming popular.

For the presenter I went to Wang Han, who was still building his career in Shanghai and hosting a variety games show called Huo Long Chuan Qi on Shanghai's Oriental Television. I thought he was funny and quick-witted, so I found his agent. Wang Han's success was no accident. The way I made programmes then, and the way every presenter I had worked with operated, was that we wrote the script for them and they read it out. I had done my homework as usual, and when I met Wang Han on the day we recorded the pilot I handed him a thick stack of pages. He glanced at it and said he did not need it. "Director, let us talk for half an hour. Just tell me what you want the programme to do and what you want it to achieve."

The finished pilot proved my point. Wang Han kept working the room and had everybody laughing. The programme was outstanding with him in it. As soon as the pilot was shot I signed a one-year contract with his agent and agreed a fee per episode.

Next came the talks with Dragon Television about putting the programme on air. I met Wan Rong, then a deputy head of Dragon Television and now a vice president of China Media Group, and Xu Wei, who later ran publicity for the World Expo. I worked with him again in 2010, and he now heads the Shanghai municipal government's Information Office. The aim was to get my programme onto a satellite channel and broadcast nationwide.

The station watched the pilot, we agreed terms for broadcast, and they set aside a weekend slot for us. The investor was preparing to put in another 10 million yuan.

That was around April 2004. Everything was going smoothly, and then disaster struck. It is a disaster everyone in esports knows well: "On April 12, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television formally issued its Notice on Prohibiting the Broadcast of Computer and Online Game Programmes."

And then, for us, there was no and then.

And then Wang Han went back to Hunan. He started at Hunan Economic Television and later picked up a satellite channel show called Super Girl.

God was good to Wang Han. My programme did not cost him Super Girl.

2. Founding NeoTV

Before I knew it, it was 2005. That year I was 25.

That was the year online video began to get going and the state began building a digital television industry.

Back to the scene BBKinG uses to open NeoTV: "In 2005, Xiong Jianming, known as Neo, who came from a television background, took a proposal for a games television channel to Zhang Shunde, a man of some weight in Shanghai's cultural circles. Zhang Shunde is the uncle of Lin Yuxin, known as Ken, who owns NeoTV at the time of writing. Zhang Shunde liked the proposal, so the Lin family put up the money and NeoTV was founded in early 2006. Ken was still studying design in the United States then, so Xiong Jianming was the executive in charge of NeoTV at that point."

The people and the timing are right, but the man of real weight was not Zhang Shunde.

Let me tell it properly.

In 2005, with PPS, PPLive and QQLive coming up and the state calling for digital television content to be built, I decided a second spring for games programming had arrived.

A mobile phone film project had introduced me to Zhang Shunde, then general manager at Shenjiang Film and Television. He liked my project and said his elder brother could invest. So we went together to see his brother Zhang Shengde, the father of Lin Yuxin, who runs NeoTV today. The Zhang family did not invest. They took my project around looking for investors.

Zhang Shengde had come out of government property administration, and his main business was property deals. He took my project around to one investor after another. After several failures, a property developer with close ties to the Zhang family put up the first 200,000 yuan.

The man of real weight was Yang Bo, former chairman of the listed company Zhuhai Hengtong Group. He was the investor who worked most often with the famous director Xie Jin during Xie Jin's lifetime, on several films and on the Xie Jin drama school at Shanghai Normal University, originally called the Xie Jin Hengtong drama school. The Zhang family did know him, but he had no intention of working with them at first. After he met me, and after two conversations, he called in his lawyers the next day and signed the investment agreement.

In fact, in NeoTV's first year the Zhang family did not put in a single fen. They used my project instead, with their family lawyer running the table, to turn what the investor believed was fresh capital into a purchase of existing shares, so the first thing they did was take 2 million yuan out of the majority shareholder, the man who was actually investing. That is the one thing I have on my conscience towards the investor. But Yang Bo carried on with us anyway, because he believed in the project's prospects.

Lin Yuxin was nowhere to be seen in NeoTV's early days. So the idea that I was some kind of temporary stand-in does not hold. Otherwise, why is NeoTV called NeoTV? Anyone who knows me knows I have used the name Neo since I played Ultima Online in 1999.

NeoTV also had a mascot in those days, a bear, which is what my surname Xiong means.

3. The "grudges" with GamesTV and PLU

People in esports are probably most interested in this part. As for the word "grudges", I never gave it much thought myself. I was running a company and doing what a CEO should do. I never paid much attention to what those two rivals thought either, but BBKinG's piece has made me want to look back and take stock.

After 2006, Wu Qiang, Huang Hao, Zhang Rui and the rest of them found the platform that would let games programming set sail again after You Dian Feng Kuang went off the air: SiTV, part of Shanghai Media Group. SiTV was short of money at first, until a company trading virtual game currency came in as an investor.

To be honest, GamesTV's budget then was four or five times NeoTV's or more, but I never took them very seriously, because anybody who has come out of a state enterprise knows exactly what those managers are: fools who understand nothing about media beyond making the stage look pretty. Apart from wasting money they cannot do anything big, and the IGE investor understood nothing about television media either. The kind of brainless sell-yourself deal they signed with Shanghai Media Group was always going to be squeezed dry and swallowed sooner or later.

What I really cared about was a crowd of hard-up enthusiasts with their hearts on fire, the players' guild PLU, who kept making programmes online in very difficult conditions. The first time I went to PLU and saw Wang Jue and the others in that crude studio with that crude broadcast equipment, a complicated feeling of respect and worry rose up in me.

Let me finish with GamesTV first, and then say what I did to PLU.

The falling-out with GamesTV started with WCG. WCG was the first "product" I planned to secure when I founded NeoTV. A new company has to have a product that stands out. We were in television, so content was our product, and the heaviest name in esports in the world at that time was of course WCG.

BBKinG's piece mentions Cody, later head of Tencent's esports platform. He and I had known each other since my days making games television. The year NeoTV was founded was also the year Tencent took the WCG online partnership. Cody came to me, and I asked him to help me negotiate with WCG.

I soon learned that the Chinese rights to WCG were not with Tencent at all. They were with China Television Media, CTV Media, the listed company under CCTV. After several months of negotiation with CTV Media, we obtained the exclusive online broadcast rights for WCG in China.

It was quite natural that GamesTV could not get the Chinese broadcast rights, because they sat with CCTV. CCTV was never going to hand them to Shanghai Media Group. NeoTV was a new media partner CCTV could very well have nurtured. Unfortunately, once I left, things did not go that way.

(Am I sounding a little arrogant? A quick word to back it up. Since leaving I have kept working with CCTV to this day. The company I run now is a partner organisation of the national organising committee of the Star of Outlook English Talent Competition on CCTV-10, the science and education channel, and I sit on that national organising committee, which is headed by the station's editor-in-chief. The list is on the official site, www.cctvoe.com.)

So GamesTV's people had not worked out the situation and were very unhappy with us. We were not competing with them at all. That business was never going to reach them.

The second falling-out was over the broadcast of the WCG world finals.

BBKinG writes: "One was that Neo is said to have paid 1 million yuan for them that year, something even Ken did not know about, which later became the main reason Ken pushed Neo out of the team."

One. I was the general manager, and also a shareholder and a founder. Short of a board resolution, or leaving of my own accord, who could ask me to go? And ask me to go on Ken's say-so? BBKinG does say this is hearsay, of course.

Two. The WCG broadcast rights were bought, every director strongly supported it, and it is the single biggest reason the company later won the right to host WCG and NeoTV is still alive today.

Those facts are there for anyone to see. Now for the small grudges the world finals rights caused.

GamesTV was still run by Wu Qiang then, and I heard the bosses above him had decided they had to have the WCG world finals rights. Shanghai Media Group's funding and budget were about five or six times mine for a year. Losing WCG China had already stung. They announced they would take the world finals, after we had spent a year laying the groundwork for them.

First of all, buying the rights was not my idea in the first place. It was GamesTV getting involved that gave the Koreans room to push the price up. That said, the Koreans were not fools either. Beyond the money, they naturally weighed a number of other factors.

NeoTV had several advantages:

1. Our live coverage of the Chinese national final that year opened Samsung's boss's eyes. At the same time Cody at Tencent worked with us to give them a very good report on the whole year's WCG viewing figures. Reach was something Samsung took very seriously.

2. I put pressure on Samsung through CTV Media. I was determined to take the world finals. At the height of the competition, CTV Media wrote to the WCG organisers in the name of China's national television station, asking WCG to consider working with us. The wording of that letter was perfectly judged, and I have kept it to this day.

After a year of preparation we were naturally better placed than GamesTV to broadcast the finals, and in the end the Koreans named a price. After several rounds of bargaining we signed a two-year agreement for the WCG world finals. The terms were US$100,000, with the second year not to exceed that figure by more than 10 per cent.

WCG also put NeoTV on the front page of its global official website, alongside GGL of the United States.

GamesTV has always said we inflated the price of content, but is US$100,000 expensive for exclusive rights to the world finals of the biggest esports competition on earth? That same year the Premier League sold three years of broadcast rights for US$50 million. Did you expect to talk foreigners into giving you content free?

Besides, I made the money back through advertising deals with PPS, PPLive and QQLive.

WCG then became an important foundation for everything NeoTV did afterwards.

GamesTV had already done a great deal of preparation to broadcast WCG, and had even been telling video sites around the industry it would. When we took the exclusive rights they were stunned. A manager at GamesTV was then introduced by a friend and came to my office to try to talk about broadcasting it together. I turned him down, naturally. We were desperate to build a brand and had just bought exclusivity, so how could we hand it to SiTV?

What happened next I can understand from a group of friends stung into a rage.

1. Because we needed to receive a European satellite signal, they started by reporting our licensing status. I naturally obtained authorisation from the relevant unit at CCTV.

2. They reported our television production and online video licensing to the cultural inspection squad. We obtained a radio and television programme production and operation licence very quickly.

3. They banned any unit under Shanghai Media Group from hiring out satellite broadcast trucks. As it happened, the head of the only satellite television transmission company in Shanghai outside Shanghai Media Group is an old friend of mine of many years. When a certain executive heard about it, he sent word that they were not to work with us. That only stirred my friend's sense of justice. He said, "This is bullying, plain and simple," refused to sign a contract with their company, and sent an engineer to help me privately, putting up a three-metre satellite dish on the roof terrace of our building and sending staff over to my company to set the equipment up. It saved me several hundred thousand yuan.

Winning the WCG rights was also the foundation of the poaching offensive I launched on PLU's people. As I said, I was never much bothered by GamesTV, with several times my funding, resources and strength. The stone on my mind was PLU, with no money, no resources and nothing else, but with all that passion.

I had been in touch with Friend and Huang Zhenggang. Instinct told me that breaking through those two was not realistic. PLU was like life itself to them. That kind of feeling can be a positive thing for running a business, but that kind of irrationality can just as easily drag a team into an abyss.

PLU really was in difficulty at the time. Content was very hard to turn into revenue. They had no Shanghai Media Group platform behind them and no tens of millions of yuan the way GamesTV did, and none of the good content and few million yuan we had. What they had was a crowd of people obsessed with esports, mad about it. And that was exactly what I wanted.

BBKinG writes in his piece:

"They say a girl's youth waits for nobody, and Wang Jue's girlfriend An Jia, who had trained as a broadcast presenter, was more anxious than most. She had dreams of her own to pursue. On one side her youth was burning away fast, on the other NeoTV wanted to build up a glamorous games presenter. So An Jia became the first person to leave PLU for NeoTV."

As BBKinG says, my first opening really was An Jia. But to say something that will hurt, An Jia was never on the list of people I wanted from PLU, not from the beginning. The PLU forum hyped her hard, or perhaps PLU wanted deliberately to build a star. To me she was neither a serious gamer nor a presenter of any rarity, since you can find that kind of presenter everywhere. NeoTV was already developing games presenters such as Xiao R and Naonao. So the idea that we urgently needed a glamorous presenter and poached one does not stand up.

(Let me cut away for a moment. People keep saying Neo behaved badly by poaching, but the first poaching was GamesTV's. They went after the pairing of Xiao R and Huang Xi that I had only just begun to build. We had barely spent a few months training Huang Xi and they came for her. Who was the ruthless one?)

I am off the point. The real reason I went to An Jia is that I suddenly found out she was Wang Jue's girlfriend. My attitude changed on the spot. Some may call me a snob. But for anyone running a company, if your hunger for talent has none of that snobbery in it, what makes you different from a man selling salt fish?

So I found a route to An Jia quickly and started talking to her. To begin with, I could offer terms PLU could not, and I believed WCG would be a chance for many more people to know her. But I believed even more strongly that she was clever Director Wang's forward post, sent inside to look us over and test us.

The rest of the history is well known. It set off a whole series of moves: Wang Jue, XiXi, Zhou Ning, Xiaose and others. They brought new energy to NeoTV and created a new league, NSL. They also set off a long series of slanging matches online. BBKinG's piece describes all this in detail and I will not go over it again.

After all this time, speaking as the man who started it, here is my own view of those moves. First, I do not think Wang Jue or any of the former PLU staff let anybody down. They came to NeoTV not for the money but out of passion for the esports industry.

Some people say that is a fiction, and PLU's supporters accused them of breaking faith and selling out for gain. First, this is a perfectly normal career choice. You sign an employment contract when you join a company; you are not sold to it. Second, starting a business is the boss's business. I see no reason to demand that employees live the same hard life as the boss. Employees need their basic living secured too. NeoTV did not offer sky-high salaries, and may not even have paid as much as GamesTV.

All I did was let you keep your dream while giving you a decent living. Every one of the people who moved did it for the WCG platform. Salary was a secondary question.

The truth is that fans online lost their heads over this and argued the roof down. For the people actually involved, it was nowhere near as irreconcilable as you imagine. What most of us were dealing with was survival.

4. Neo is pushed out

BBKinG has written a vivid and tragic story, and reading his piece is what made me want to write this.

It is nothing like what he wrote. He may have heard it from Cody, he may have heard it from Ken. Naturally I should give my version, and then everyone will understand.

I was 25 when NeoTV was founded. I had run a business briefly before, but I really was inexperienced in company law and in management. It was an unhealthy company from the day it was founded, something I came to see far more clearly through my wife, who has worked in investment since 2008 at the well-known venture capital firm IDG Capital, and through the many friends in that industry around us since.

By an unhealthy company I mean one in which the founder and the team hold too small a share. PLU was probably healthier than us on that count.

The whole team's shareholding, including what I held on their behalf, came to 22 per cent in total. The three entities of the real investor, Yang Bo's group, held 48 per cent. The other 30 per cent was in fact controlled by the Lin family, but no money had been paid for it. Zhang Shunde received 9 per cent as founder's equity for introducing the investor, and his brother received another 9 per cent as an introducer. Then, once the first-round investor had taken the 2 million yuan premium, the remaining 12 per cent was transferred to Lin Yuxin, who runs the company today.

With WCG a great success, I planned to package NeoTV as new media for games, which brought a number of VCs into discussions and made Ken's family realise this was a good business. Until then the family had been in property. Lin Yuxin came back from the United States at this point and joined the company as vice president. But there was no actual work for him to do.

At the same time, Cody left Tencent and joined NeoTV, and I appointed him COO. When Cody joined he did not understand the old board or the complicated relationships between the investors. He had never touched programme-making before and had no relevant experience. Very soon, though, the two men with the least to do, Ken and Cody, found each other.

Later Cody pressed me repeatedly over equity, but this was in the middle of second-round investment talks and could not be done at once. I was also working hard to win more equity for the team. Cody was unhappy about it.

BBKinG writes in his piece:

"In early 2008, Lin Yuxin, Ken, came back from the United States and found the company in turmoil because of Neo. Wang Jue had left in anger, and Cody is said to have come to blows with Neo. Nobody agreed with Neo's thinking either. He wanted to build a vertical video-on-demand platform for games, which in today's terms would be something like a standalone Youku games channel. That was the exact opposite of the programme-making approach favoured by Wang Jue and others."

Coming to blows with Cody did happen. What makes it so absurd is that it was over one employee being asked to write a self-criticism. He felt strongly that I might have interfered in his work, and when he stormed out of my office for no clear reason and I tried to catch up with him to have it out, he suddenly exploded and hit me. Looking back now, I still think it was about getting onto the board and about his own interests, but he had no idea how complicated the company's situation was, and the only person protecting his interests was Ken.

As for who was right and who was wrong, now that he too has left NeoTV, I am sure he has reached a clear judgement of his own.

Wang Jue leaving in anger and being asked back again and again is a piece of melodrama that never happened. I do not know where you heard it. Wang Jue and I never fell out either. He was making programmes at NeoTV the whole time, and he and I even worked on something small together last year.

Let me sum up why I left.

1. We failed to attract investment. Several VCs, Legend Capital among them, met the board formally and said the team's shareholding was too small. They wanted to buy shares and transfer some of them to the team. The Lin family refused.

2. Because the second round was not going smoothly, the company came under financial pressure. This was exactly when the internet video industry was taking off. Tudou started up in the floor below our office and was stimulated by large amounts of funding. We began building a games video sharing platform, and our bandwidth costs expanded rapidly.

3. Because of that question of business direction, Ken kept meeting the three main investors and reporting to the board that I was "running the business badly" and "managing it chaotically".

4. The immediate trigger was an investment agreement I had settled with the CEO of a major internet advertising company in Beijing. That investor had met every member of the board and the two sides had signed a letter of intent, and then he pulled out at the last minute. Since I was the one who had found him and held the talks, I later learned that the Lin family had met him privately several times.

5. The talks about a WCG world finals in Shanghai went badly. I was leading the discussions with the Shanghai Media and Entertainment Group, the parent body of Shanghai Media Group, about holding the WCG world finals in Shanghai, and they went nowhere. I met the group's president, Xue Peijian, and he was genuinely interested at first. But after several rounds of negotiation with the Koreans he felt the terms were too harsh, and nothing more came of it. (Shanghai's leaders set their sights high in any case. Disney, the World Expo, they have seen it all. The Koreans could not get anywhere with Shanghai's leaders, and in the end the WCG world finals in China went to a second-tier city like Chengdu, which I think did affect the brand.)

6. One day in 2007, Ken called a meeting of the seven-member board and, with 30 per cent of the votes, demanded that I be removed as general manager and made executive deputy general manager instead. Of the three real investors, two agreed. Yang Bo, the investor behind director Xie Jin, did not.

I was 26 then, young and proud. I had nothing but contempt for power struggles inside a company, and I was certainly not going to take that deputy post. So I handed the board my resignation. Looking back now, I feel I let the real investor, Yang Bo, down. He sought me out several times afterwards to talk, and even used the story of Deng Xiaoping's three falls and three comebacks to lecture me. He wanted me to stay at NeoTV. I still refused, and after that I transferred my shares and left.

I formally left NeoTV in January 2008. Not long after I left, the three original investors also asked to sell and get out. The Lin family agreed a price with them and they exited in 2008 as well. NeoTV today is Ken's family business.

So my departure was nothing like the melodrama in BBKinG's piece. It was the ordinary process of power changing hands inside a company.

None of what I have written is meant to say that Ken is a bad man or a schemer. After he took full control of NeoTV he put a great deal more investment into it. Today's NeoTV is in fact healthier, since one hand on the tiller beats a crowd of people manoeuvring against one another, though I am sure he has also realised this industry is not as easy to make big money in as he once imagined.

My impression of Ken at the time was of a rich man's idle son, someone with no real ability who had drifted around abroad and come home, saw that his relatives and I had a project that looked impressive and profitable, and decided he had to have control of it. And I was young, and handled many things very subjectively. I got plenty of things wrong about our business direction too.

But NeoTV is still here five years after I left. As my friends in investment say, any founder who can keep a company alive for more than three years is a great one. NeoTV has lasted to this day, and what I want to say to him is that I have genuine respect for him and that the view I held back then was wrong.

5. My view of esports

After leaving NeoTV I spent some time still working in esports. News Corporation in the United States had built a professional major league called CGS. It was like the NBA, with 18 clubs (Dallas Venom, Singapore Sword: the names alone sound like the NBA). The matches were made in the style of a television reality show, with results counted by team. In a FIFA match, for instance, losing was not simply losing. How many goals you could pull back to narrow the aggregate difference mattered too, which made it very watchable. The champion's prize each season was US$1 million, and every player in the league was on a salary, with a minimum of US$30,000 a year.

News Corporation invested US$50 million in total. Its own satellite television network, the largest in the United States, handled production, and the programmes went out on the Star TV international channel, Sky television and others. I produced three shows for their Asian division.

That programme was the closest I have ever come to the mass-market esports I have always wanted. If you are interested, try searching for their shows.

Unfortunately, the American financial crisis broke at the end of 2008. News Corporation stopped the project before the business model had a chance to prove itself. Shortly before it was stopped, I had just got CCTV's digital television arm to sign a memorandum of cooperation with CGS. The plan was to bring the project into China.

Then in 2009 I set up another company working with CCTV's science and education channel and gradually moved into children's education. We have developed our own products now, interactive entertainment products for children. It is an enormous market.

Looking back at esports from there, it has no shortage of passion and no shortage of young people willing to give everything. But the business model has never broken past advertising and sponsorship. Without a business model strong enough to support it, friends I know keep leaving the industry quietly.

As for the controversies about me personally, all I wanted was to bring a spring to this industry. Without an economic breakthrough there is no industry to develop. Since I started in this business I have never wanted to comment much on the arguments online. Running a company leaves no room for fussing. The bitterness and the tears all have to be swallowed yourself. But you have to go forward, firmly and decisively.

The things I have described are trivia. There is no blood feud between people. Most of it is simply the road a business has to walk. Professionally I have done right by my company, and morally my conscience is clear. My way of doing things may sometimes have hurt people, but it was all for the sake of the work we shared, and I hope the friends I offended without meaning to will forgive me.

NEO

March 21, 2013