Currently, Korea is seen as the best Starcraft nation in the world. It has the highest concentration of excellent players with huge government support to found the E-sports industry. Its player base reach numbers which may even outnumber totaled players from several nations. Korea too has multiple offline tournaments, leagues, televised matches etc. Fan clubs were organized in conjunction of multiple ‘favourite’ star players.
 

China currently is second to that standard of industry. However, the Chinese pro-scene is rather isolated from the rest of the world events in Starcraft. Why is that so unlike nearby Korea? The problem is lag. Chinese players always have lag issues with the rest of the world. Even China has lag with the popular ICCUP (International Cyber Cup) server in next door Russia, the primary staging area for foreigner Starcraft tournaments. Hence, they are mostly if not always banned from online tournaments in the Starcraft world. The Koreans do not have such problems in spite of their lack of participation in world events due to their priority on domestic tournaments / leagues. Besides, the Korean fans prefer watching their players duking it out among other multiple Korean pro-gaming teams. Foreigners (Non-Koreans) are seen in general as lower standards than the Koreans. Thus joining such world tournaments would be a ‘breeze’ and thus unnecessary.
 

With that matters aside, let’s take a look into the ‘China lag’. Actually, China’s Internet Infrastructure is very adequate considering the enormous size of the country. In the cities, Internet is very much available. There’s a common relation goes where the more developed the city is, the higher maximum internet speed that can be acquired. It’s meant in terms of relative development of course. Unbelieving of course, I performed several more tests in the other cities during my travel such as Guilin and Yangshuo. Results were similar although slower but the values were still significant in comparison to the ‘China lag’.

 

How did this ‘China lag’ come from? For those who are uninformed, the answer is simple. It’s Government intervention. China’s internet infrastructure is powerful with its connections secured with two base points in Shanghai and Hong Kong for the world Internet underwater cables. The strength however is only within the country. International connections are simply horrible, sometimes worse than the slowest internet package offered by Malaysian ISPs. The reason is due to China government’s policy on Internet control. They have enacted various systems to filter and block all websites that are deemed harmful to China’s society (Such as Facebook, Youtube, Skype, Twitter etc). With millions and possibly billions of connections going in and out at once, the filtration systems simply cannot keep up and it creates a backlog, sometimes allowing some to slip through due to work overload. In order to cope, the line needed to be throttled down in order to be able to filter everything and then some. Hence here’s how we get the ‘China lag’.