Kunlun Red Star’s Spencer Foo (Jiang Fu on the Chinese national team) during a KHL game in December against Avangard.
photo: Grigori Sysoyev / RIA Novosti
From a four-time Stanley Cup winner to a Swiss Hall-of-Famer, China’s men’s hockey program has had plenty of international contact over the years. Even before Beijing was slated to host the Olympic Winter Games, the People’s Republic was forging international partnerships to grow the game.
For China, it’s a chance to profit from greater expertise in more established hockey nations; for the rest of the world, it’s a way to access the huge, untapped hockey audience in the world’s most populous country.
Sharks and Dragons
One of the first global collaborations came in 2007 when China first entered a team in the cross-border Asia League. The club was born of a merger between Harbin and Qiqihar, two traditional powerhouses of China’s domestic league. But the clincher was a partnership with the San Jose Sharks which brought the legendary Claude Lemieux out of retirement to play a couple of games for the team. The powerful Canadian winger, a four-time Stanley Cup winner and 1988 Canada Cup champion, suited up for two games in China in the 2008/09 season, after four seasons of inactivity.
The partnership also enabled Chinese players to train in the USA. However, in 2009, San Jose withdrew its funding and the team was rebranded as China Dragon, continuing to play in the Asia League against the top club teams from Japan and Korea. Among the players, goaltender Han Pengfei made it to the Games after four seasons in the Asia League. However, neither incarnation of the club was successful and the Dragon was disbanded in 2017 as the Kunlun Red Star project took over the mantle as China’s leading hockey club.
The Dragon name returned in 2019/20 when the China Golden Dragons competed in the Czech third tier. Coached by Jiri Sejba, who won two Extraliga titles as assistant at Pardubice, as well as leading TKS Tychy to the Polish title, and with Czech hockey legend Jaromir Jagr playing an advisory role, the team brought together a roster of young Chinese players, plus a handful of Czech prospects. It proved to be a steep learning curve, with the team losing 41 out of 42 games in regulation and suffering an overtime loss in its other outing. However, Xudong Xiang was second in scoring on the team with 22 (12+10) points in 40 games to push himself firmly into the national team spotlight. Two other skaters, forward Guo Jianing and defenceman Yan Ruinan also had a few games in Czechia on their way to the Olympic roster, while goalie Han Pengfei was again a regular part of the team.
A Swiss connection
Not every project involved establishing a team in a foreign league. In 2019, China sent groups of players to Switzerland’s Federal Office of Sports in Magglingen. Two men’s teams had six-month stints there, working closely with IIHF Hall-of-Famer Jakob Kolliker, who also coached China’s U20 and women’s national teams at the time. The full immersion in Swiss hockey culture was credited with helping China’s juniors win promotion from World Championship Division III. A similar program sent two more teams – one men’s, one women’s – to Finland’s Olympic Training Centre at Vuokatti. However, after making progress in 2019, both projects were curtailed by the onset of the pandemic as travel in and out of China was heavily restricted at the start of 2020.
Red Star and the Red Machine
Russia has always had an influence on Chinese hockey. The game developed fastest in the Heilongjiang Region of northern China, close to the Russian border (Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River, is the Chinese name for the Amur river that separates the two countries). In the Asia League days, it wasn’t unusual to see Russian and Belarusian players at China Dragon. And, with Russia’s KHL eager to expand into new markets, putting a high-level professional team in China was a logical step for both sides.
Kunlun Red Star, now in its sixth season in the KHL, supplies every player on the men’s roster in Beijing. The organization also supplies the women’s team at this year’s Games under the name KRS Vanke Rays. But, alongside the KHL flagship, teams also played in Russia’s second-tier VHL and the junior league MHL until the onset of the pandemic.
That created a pathway that enabled talented Chinese or Chinese-heritage players to develop from promising youngsters into players with pro experience. On the Olympic roster, that pathway has delivered several players to the Games. They include Ouban Yongli (Paris O’Brien), a 21-year-old goalie from British Columbia who followed his family tree back to China and worked his way through the juniors to debut in the KHL this season. Defenceman Zhang Pengfei, 23, had a similar journey while Zheng Enlai (Ty Schultz), who made a similar journey from Vancouver to Beijing, graduated from the VHL to the first team this season and Chen Zemeng, 24, divided his time in the VHL between Red Star’s farm club and the independent Tsen Tou Jilin team.
Up front, Guo Jianing scored heavily in that U20 Division III promotion campaign after honing his skills in the MHL and Xiang Xedong moved from the national team to spend two seasons in the VHL before stepping up to the Dragons via a spell in Czechia. And Rudi Ying, who initially swapped Beijing for Boston in a bid to boost his hockey skills, was able to return home following the formation of Red Star and represented the club at all levels on his way to the Olympics.
For China, it’s a chance to profit from greater expertise in more established hockey nations; for the rest of the world, it’s a way to access the huge, untapped hockey audience in the world’s most populous country.
Sharks and Dragons
One of the first global collaborations came in 2007 when China first entered a team in the cross-border Asia League. The club was born of a merger between Harbin and Qiqihar, two traditional powerhouses of China’s domestic league. But the clincher was a partnership with the San Jose Sharks which brought the legendary Claude Lemieux out of retirement to play a couple of games for the team. The powerful Canadian winger, a four-time Stanley Cup winner and 1988 Canada Cup champion, suited up for two games in China in the 2008/09 season, after four seasons of inactivity.
The partnership also enabled Chinese players to train in the USA. However, in 2009, San Jose withdrew its funding and the team was rebranded as China Dragon, continuing to play in the Asia League against the top club teams from Japan and Korea. Among the players, goaltender Han Pengfei made it to the Games after four seasons in the Asia League. However, neither incarnation of the club was successful and the Dragon was disbanded in 2017 as the Kunlun Red Star project took over the mantle as China’s leading hockey club.
The Dragon name returned in 2019/20 when the China Golden Dragons competed in the Czech third tier. Coached by Jiri Sejba, who won two Extraliga titles as assistant at Pardubice, as well as leading TKS Tychy to the Polish title, and with Czech hockey legend Jaromir Jagr playing an advisory role, the team brought together a roster of young Chinese players, plus a handful of Czech prospects. It proved to be a steep learning curve, with the team losing 41 out of 42 games in regulation and suffering an overtime loss in its other outing. However, Xudong Xiang was second in scoring on the team with 22 (12+10) points in 40 games to push himself firmly into the national team spotlight. Two other skaters, forward Guo Jianing and defenceman Yan Ruinan also had a few games in Czechia on their way to the Olympic roster, while goalie Han Pengfei was again a regular part of the team.
A Swiss connection
Not every project involved establishing a team in a foreign league. In 2019, China sent groups of players to Switzerland’s Federal Office of Sports in Magglingen. Two men’s teams had six-month stints there, working closely with IIHF Hall-of-Famer Jakob Kolliker, who also coached China’s U20 and women’s national teams at the time. The full immersion in Swiss hockey culture was credited with helping China’s juniors win promotion from World Championship Division III. A similar program sent two more teams – one men’s, one women’s – to Finland’s Olympic Training Centre at Vuokatti. However, after making progress in 2019, both projects were curtailed by the onset of the pandemic as travel in and out of China was heavily restricted at the start of 2020.
Red Star and the Red Machine
Russia has always had an influence on Chinese hockey. The game developed fastest in the Heilongjiang Region of northern China, close to the Russian border (Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River, is the Chinese name for the Amur river that separates the two countries). In the Asia League days, it wasn’t unusual to see Russian and Belarusian players at China Dragon. And, with Russia’s KHL eager to expand into new markets, putting a high-level professional team in China was a logical step for both sides.
Kunlun Red Star, now in its sixth season in the KHL, supplies every player on the men’s roster in Beijing. The organization also supplies the women’s team at this year’s Games under the name KRS Vanke Rays. But, alongside the KHL flagship, teams also played in Russia’s second-tier VHL and the junior league MHL until the onset of the pandemic.
That created a pathway that enabled talented Chinese or Chinese-heritage players to develop from promising youngsters into players with pro experience. On the Olympic roster, that pathway has delivered several players to the Games. They include Ouban Yongli (Paris O’Brien), a 21-year-old goalie from British Columbia who followed his family tree back to China and worked his way through the juniors to debut in the KHL this season. Defenceman Zhang Pengfei, 23, had a similar journey while Zheng Enlai (Ty Schultz), who made a similar journey from Vancouver to Beijing, graduated from the VHL to the first team this season and Chen Zemeng, 24, divided his time in the VHL between Red Star’s farm club and the independent Tsen Tou Jilin team.
Up front, Guo Jianing scored heavily in that U20 Division III promotion campaign after honing his skills in the MHL and Xiang Xedong moved from the national team to spend two seasons in the VHL before stepping up to the Dragons via a spell in Czechia. And Rudi Ying, who initially swapped Beijing for Boston in a bid to boost his hockey skills, was able to return home following the formation of Red Star and represented the club at all levels on his way to the Olympics.