The night of November 6 last year was one to remember for young people across China. In Wuhan, thousands thronged the streets to celebrate, chanting “EDG!” “Niubi!”, employing a somewhat coarse Chinese phrase. At one music conservatory, students belted out the operatic aria Nessun Dorma above the din of a marching band.
A sudden burst of excitement about the Communist Party’s forthcoming 6th Plenum in Beijing? Or had China’s normally terrible national men’s soccer team won a match?
The celebrations were in fact sparked by victory for Edward Gaming, a Shanghai-based professional eSports team known as EDG, in the 2021 League of Legends World Championship. Overcoming its underdog status, EDG had become the third Chinese team in four years to win the global crown.
The mass excitement over EDG’s surprise win is testament to the huge popularity of eSports in China, where some 100 million viewers tuned in to the 2021 championship on streaming platform Bilibili;
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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
