The Xiangqi World Championship

Every world champion, 1990 to 2025

Nineteen editions, eleven winners. One row per player, in the order they first took the title, with a bar over the years they held it.

Two things fall out of the shape. The left half belongs to three men, and the right half turns red at 2009 and stays red until the last row.

Lü Qin 吕钦, 1990

Five world titles across fifteen years and five Chinese national titles, 1986 to 2004. Guangdong called him 羊城少帅, the Young Marshal of Guangzhou, and later paired him with Xu Yinchuan as 岭南双雄, the twin heroes of Lingnan. He is the most decorated player on this page and was never, in any single year, the best player in China.

That sentence is the article in miniature. Hu Ronghua was ahead of him at home for most of his career and never entered this event; Lü Qin won it five times. Wu Guilin of Chinese Taipei was the strongest player outside the mainland for two decades and the recurring answer to who could actually beat these men, and Lü Qin beat him in 1990, 1995 and 1997.

Zhao Guorong 赵国荣, 1991

World champion in 1991 and four times Chinese national champion, spread across eighteen years from 1990 to 2008, which is a longer span at the top than anyone here except Hu Ronghua managed. He learned in Harbin under Wang Jialiang, known as the Northeast Tiger, and the sport made him the New Northeast Tiger in turn.

He is one of three men on this list with no ruling against him.

Xu Tianhong 徐天红, 1993

World champion in 1993 in Beijing with seven and a half points from nine, the year after taking the Chinese national title. He is from Taizhou in Jiangsu, and the sport calls him 笑面佛, the Smiling Buddha, because he smiles right through a game. What is behind the smile is tight openings and a habit of grinding advantages too small to see into wins.

He is the one champion here without a game, and that is a fact about the archives rather than about him. Four games survive from the 1993 edition in the databases this article draws on, and none of them are his. Showing a game from another event would be a different claim than the one this page makes.

Xu Yinchuan 许银川, 1999

Three world titles, 1999, 2003 and 2007, alongside six Chinese national championships. He won his first national title at eighteen, second only to Hu Ronghua’s fifteen, and spent two decades as the best player in the country not named Hu Ronghua.

Like Lü Qin he came out of Guangdong, like Lü Qin he built his game on endgames, and like Lü Qin he is one of the three men here with a clean record.

Zhao Xinxin 赵鑫鑫, 2009

From Taizhou in Zhejiang, national champion at nineteen in 2007, and world champion at twenty-one in 2009 with fifteen points from nine games. He is still the youngest man to have won this title, and taking it completed the set of national, Asian and world championships that Chinese xiangqi calls a grand slam.

He was banned for life on 12 January 2025, in the ruling that sanctioned forty-one people at once.

Jiang Chuan 蒋川, 2011

Born in Yongjia, Zhejiang, in 1984. He took the Chinese national title in 2010 and the world title in Jakarta the year after, and he was the first player to pass 2700 on the rating list.

He is better known outside the tournament hall for blindfold play. On 3 January 2011 he took nineteen boards at once against Liu Dahua’s record and beat it with twenty, ending a mark that had stood since February 1995; he went to twenty-two in 2013 and to twenty-six after that, which is where the Guinness entry sits. He drew a five-year ban in April 2026.

Wang Tianyi 王天一, 2013

Three world titles and four Chinese national ones, and ten consecutive years at the top of the world rating list. In May 2023 he became the first player to hold a live rating above 2800. Beijing called him 外星人, the alien, for arriving from outside the provincial team system and beating everyone anyway.

The Chinese Xiangqi Association banned him for life in September 2024 and revoked his grandmaster title. A court in Hangzhou convicted him a year later.

The opponent below is the reason to show this particular game: Wang Kuo is himself a Chinese national champion, and the strongest man Wang Tianyi faced across his three world finals.

Zheng Weitong 郑惟桐, 2015

Born in Chengdu in 1994. He took the Chinese national title in 2014 and again in 2015, then the world title in the same year, which is the harder order to do it in. He went to Tsinghua by recommendation in 2020 and won the individual gold at the 2023 Asian Games, China’s two hundredth medal of those Games.

He was banned for life on 12 January 2025. His title year also produced the longest game in either of these articles, and the opponent is the reason to show it.

Xu Chao 徐超, 2019

From Wujiang in Suzhou, born 1981, playing from the age of seven and national youth champion at sixteen. He waited a long time for the senior title and took it in 2017 by beating the defending champion Wang Tianyi, becoming the nineteenth man to win the Chinese championship. The world title followed in Vancouver in 2019.

He was banned for life in April 2026.

Meng Chen 孟辰, 2023

Born in Anshan, Liaoning, in 1988, and one of only two men on this list who never won the Chinese national championship. He took the 2023 world title in Houston by beating Lại Lý Huynh in a tiebreak, which is the second time on this page that the future champion loses to a champion before becoming one.

He drew a six-month ban in January 2025, the lightest ruling here.

Why the national title is the harder one

Lü Qin has five of the nineteen titles, Xu Yinchuan three and Wang Tianyi three, so eleven of the nineteen editions belong to three men. Nine of the eleven world champions also won the Chinese national championship. The two who did not are Meng Chen, who took the 2023 world title, and Lại Lý Huynh, who is Vietnamese and could never have entered the Chinese event.

That is the whole argument in one line. The world field is drawn from the same pool as the national field, minus most of it. China sends a small delegation, the rest of the entry is the strongest players from everywhere else, and for thirty-five years everywhere else was not close. A player who can win in Beijing can usually win in Singapore or Vancouver; the reverse has almost never been true.

The comparison English readers reach for is the wrong way round. The world title here is closer to a strong invitational than to a world championship, and the national championship is the thing with the deep field, the long history and the names everyone knows. Lü Qin has five world titles and never finished a year as the best player in China; Hu Ronghua, who was that player for two decades, never won this event at all.

The decade with a ruling on it

Every edition from 2009 to 2023 was won by a man who now has a published ruling against him. That is eight championships and six men: three banned for life, one convicted in court, one given five years, and one given six months.

The rulings came out of the match-fixing case the Chinese press calls 录音门, the recording gate, which the Chinese Xiangqi Association worked through between 2024 and 2026. It has a page of its own: the investigation, everyone sanctioned, the reasoning, and the sources. The findings are by the sport’s own governing body rather than allegations, and they are about those players’ careers rather than about specific world championship games.

The names stay in the table and the sections stay on the page. A list that quietly dropped them would be a worse record of what happened, and what the rulings do not tell you is which games were fixed. The national championship list tells the same decade from the other side, where ten of the thirteen men who have won since 2005 carry a ruling.

Shanghai, September 2025

The 2025 championship was played in Shanghai in September, and won by Lại Lý Huynh of Vietnam, who beat Yin Sheng of China in the final on the twenty-seventh. He is the first man from outside China to take the standard title in the thirty-five years the event has existed.

It is tempting to read the two facts together, as though the bans opened a door. That reading is too neat. He was born in Vĩnh Long in 1990, won the world rapid title in 2022, and reached this final in 2023 before losing it to Meng Chen in a tiebreak. He appears twice more on this page, losing to Zheng Weitong in 2015 and to Meng Chen in 2023, which is a decade of arriving before he won anything. Vietnam has been the second strongest xiangqi nation for a generation without much English notice.

Where that leaves the title

Nineteen editions, eleven winners, and a question that had the same answer for thirty-five years. The world title had never left China. Now it has, in the same decade the sport spent voiding its own results, and those two things are worth keeping separate.

What the title is worth is a separate question again, and the honest answer is that it has always been worth less than the championship held in Beijing. That is not a slight on the men who won it. It is what happens when one country is this far ahead of the rest, and it is the thing 2025 has started to change.

Nine of the ten games on this page are chapters in a study you can work through properly: the full move tree, the engine’s lines as branches you can walk, one chapter per champion in the order they appear here.