10M Chess Players In China And Growing

[Sean Evans]

http://www.boston.com/ae/games/articles ... _in_china/

As the world increasingly views China as an economic powerhouse, it is interesting that its chess activities appear to parallel its productivity. China has long had two widely played board games: Weiqi (Go) and Xiangqi (Chinese Chess), but Western-style chess is now claiming a bigger foothold there.

The western form of chess was not popular in China at first, but interest gradually increased in the latter part of the 20th century and the Chinese Chess Association, formed in 1986, adopted the game. Its expectation is that in the near future there will be 10 million chess players in the country. CCA presides over chess administration in China. For one thing it is very active in training players for the various types of foreign competitions. It also has its own chess league.

[wx2010]

one of the major reason, I think, is the progress on chess software development and the flexibility of chess compared to the Chinese Go. However, to my own opinion, Chinese Go is far more complicated than Chess and is more like a real war in terms of attacking and defense. I would highly recommend our genius Chess software programmer to contribute to the development of GO software which is too weak compared to human players.