The Xiangqi Match-Fixing Case

Players paid each other to lose

The January 2025 and April 2026 rulings use the same formula: those sanctioned took part in 买棋 and 卖棋, buying and selling games, by way of 行贿 and 受贿, giving and taking bribes. The first notice, in September 2024, says only 买棋卖棋 and 操纵比赛, manipulating competition. Money moved from player to player, in cash, sometimes through intermediaries.

It was not a gambling case, though English write-ups often reach for the word. The charges are offering and accepting bribes as a non-state functionary, and no ruling or indictment describes betting.

Why buying a game paid for itself

Rating points were not just a ranking. Under the system in force at the time they fed appearance and per-game fees, which made them the number a professional was paid on. That produced an asymmetry: a top-rated player gained almost nothing from beating a weaker one and lost a great deal from slipping, while the weaker player earned so little that a fee for losing beat the result. On CCTV, the player Cai Yi 才溢 illustrated the gap as perhaps ¥20,000 a game for a marquee name in a sponsored team event against ¥4,000 for an ordinary master. That rating system was abolished on 30 January 2026 and replaced with a rolling 52-week ranking.

The sport administration’s chess and card centre gave three motives in all: promotion through the grade titles, private division of prize money, and inflating the rating itself. Results were arranged to hit the norms for 特级大师, grandmaster, with players negotiating prices across a national individual championship, and in team events the same trade bought qualification as 运动健将, Master of Sport, which the coverage calls 搭便车, free-riding.

Which is why paying to win a game you would probably have won anyway is not irrational. You are not buying the point. You are buying the rating that sets next season’s fee and the title that outlasts any single event, and against those, tens of thousands of yuan for one game is cheap.

A recording, and a whistleblower nobody could dismiss

In April 2023 recordings of phone calls between two grandmasters, Hao Jichao 郝继超 and Wang Yuefei 王跃飞, appeared online. On them the two discuss buying and selling games, engine cheating, and manipulating rating points. Wang Tianyi is named on the tapes but was not on the calls. The Chinese press named the affair after them: 录音门, the recording gate.

Liu Dahua 柳大华, then 73 and the holder of a one-against-nineteen blindfold record, had been saying for years that opponents’ moves were 相当的精准，和软件一模一样, uncannily precise, identical to the software. On 17 October 2023 he and Dang Fei 党斐 made a 实名举报, a real-name accusation, against Guo Liping 郭莉萍, a deputy director at the sport administration’s chess and card centre. That turned a leaked tape into a governance scandal. Liu was attacked online for it and brought two private criminal prosecutions, one for criminal insult and one for defamation, winning both. Dang Fei is on the list below, at three years.

How the recordings reached the internet is reported by one outlet and confirmed by none: that Hao Jichao made them himself, gave them to Hong Zhi 洪智 after a suspension he considered unjust, and that Hong passed them on. Hong Zhi was himself convicted in 2025 and banned for life the following April.

Two processes, one case

The disciplinary track and the criminal track are separate. They ran on different timetables, and the six convicted are six of the forty-nine banned rather than a different group.

The Chinese Xiangqi Association has sanctioned 49 people in three batches: two in September 2024, forty-one in January 2025, and six in April 2026. That is 8 lifetime bans, 37 timed bans and 4 public reprimands. Revocation of the technical grade title accompanies 19 of the 45 bans rather than all of them. Only the three timed bans in the April 2026 notice carry published start and end dates, all running from 24 July 2024; the January notice publishes no dates at all, so when most of those bans expire is not a matter of public record.

The association published almost every name. Where a player also appears on the champion lists, his national title years are in the last column.

Hao Jichao, whose recordings started the case, is in the four-year-three-month tier, and was never criminally charged: the sporting penalty is the only one he carries. Xu Chongfeng’s two-year ban ran out on 23 July 2026, and the shorter bans from the January batch will have ended before it.

Separately, the Shangcheng District People’s Court in Hangzhou convicted six grandmasters on 24 September 2025 of offering and accepting bribes as non-state functionaries, under Articles 163 and 164 of the criminal law. The Chinese press calls it the sport’s first criminal corruption case.

A third track went nowhere in public. Three officials left the chess and card centre while the case ran: its director Zhu Guoping 朱国平 and its discipline secretary Guo Yujun 郭玉军 in November 2024, and Guo Liping in December. No removal notice mentions this case, and no official has been reported as charged or sanctioned in connection with it.

The strongest player in the world was buying

Wang Tianyi was China’s top-rated player from 2014 to 2023, known simply as 象棋第一人, the number one. The prosecution charged 22 separate acts of giving bribes totalling ¥942,000, against 2 acts of taking them totalling ¥116,000. Nineteen of the 22 payments ran through Wang Yuefei.

Eight yuan paid for every one received. He was not a weak player selling games he would have lost: he was the best player in the world, buying them. He pleaded guilty, was banned for life a year before the verdict, and apologised publicly in October 2025.

Hong Zhi was the only one of the six who contested the charge. His appeal was rejected on 10 February 2026, and because he was taken into custody on sentencing day, roughly a year after Wang Tianyi, he will be released considerably later despite the shorter term.

The cheating nobody charged

Engine cheating runs through every account of this affair and appears in no ruling. It is the substance of the recordings, of Liu Dahua’s accusation, and of the press investigations, while the findings cite only bribery and the buying and selling of games. Nothing published resolves it either way.

What exists is testimony. Liu Dahua says that at a league match in Ordos in October 2018 he was standing beside Hao Jichao’s game against a teammate of his own when he twice heard a voice call a move, 卒5平4, pawn five to the fourth file, and that Hao then played it. He suspected smartwatches as the capture device, and says that at an earlier fixture where watches were collected before play, Hao lost two games. This is his account, and no finding confirms any of it.

Xu Yinchuan, who won six national titles and three world titles and is named in none of the three notices, is quoted as saying 有了软件以后，就感觉自己的棋跟软件比就根本没法下, that once the software existed his own play felt unplayable measured against it. He is describing what engines did to a professional’s confidence in preparation rather than accusing anyone, which is worth keeping distinct.

Tao Hanming, the 1994 champion, spoke out against software cheating in January 2016 and retracted the next day, saying he had spoken out of turn after drinking. A friend later told Jiemian the drink was cover for pressure. Which version to believe is the kind of thing a disciplinary finding settles, and none did.

No result has been struck from the record

No ruling says which individual games were bought. What was revoked is the personal technical grade, the 特级大师 or 大师 rank, which is a title conferred on a player rather than a tournament result. No championship or team title appears to have been annulled, and the champion lists on this site are unchanged. Ratings are a special case: none were struck, but the whole rating system was abolished on 30 January 2026 and replaced.

So the names stay on those pages with the finding beside them. Dropping them would assert something the rulings do not: that the games themselves were not real.

Where the sport is now

The league came back. The 2025 national men’s league ran its preliminary from 30 July 2025 and opened the main stage in Harbin on 3 August, with revised eligibility rules and a reformed format: 25 teams, ten advancing to a double round-robin, four boards played in two waves of two, and a blitz tiebreak deciding drawn matches. Whether the format was designed against collusion is not stated anywhere official, but a match that cannot end level is harder to arrange.

Thirty-seven of the bans expire. Eight do not. The 2025 national championship was won by Wang Yubo 王禹博, the first title since Xu Yinchuan’s in 2009 that comes with no asterisk on it, and the 2025 world title left China for the first time.

Sources

All of it is Chinese-language reporting, listed so a reader who reads Chinese can check it rather than take our word for it.

Several claims here rest on thinner ground than the rest, and the text says so where they appear: five of the six sentences trace to the prosecution rather than a released judgment, all of Liu Dahua’s testimony and the Xu Yinchuan quotation are single-sourced accounts, the route the recordings took to the internet is one outlet’s investigation, the officials’ departures are not officially tied to this case, and the absence of any annulled result is inferred from silence rather than stated in a ruling.