Chai Xufeng – The Father of Thai Go and the Business of the Board
In Bangkok, people who follow Go often talk about a solidly built, broad-faced middle-aged man who moves easily between Chinese and Thai, always with a slight smile. A legendary Chinese 9-dan once said of him: “Without him, Thai Go would not look the way it does today. Calling him ‘the Father of Thai Go’ is not an exaggeration.”
That man is Chai Xufeng – vice chairman of Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group and founding president of the Thai Go Association. To many in Thailand, he is not only a powerful businessman, but also the person who planted Go in Thai soil and turned it into a national movement.
Discovering Go Late – And Never Letting It Go
Chai did not grow up with Go. Around his mid-20s, roughly thirty years before that interview, he first encountered the game in a book. Once he learned the rules, he never put it down again. He loved playing, but more importantly, he drew nourishment from Go and eventually came to credit much of his business success to the game.
He often compares the growth of a company to a Go game entering the middlegame:
when a business reaches a certain stage, many problems emerge. At that point, you must understand turning points, trade-offs, and sacrifice. You cannot cling to every single “group of stones” at once. Some ventures simply cannot be saved; if there is no realistic hope of revival, you must be able to abandon them. Only by giving something up can you move toward a higher goal. For him, Go taught this clearly: you must know when to let stones go.
His thinking about competition is also deeply shaped by Go. He once told his staff:
Don’t just think about how to defeat your opponent. Think about how to make yourself better, stronger, and more competitive. The goal is to leave your competitors behind, not simply to crush them. If you obsess over “destroying” the opponent, you burn out your own people. What we need is not destruction, but creation. That is what Go taught me.
He also reflects on East and West: while the West focuses on searching for new laws and models, many in the East have blindly chased Western thinking – until, exhausted, they realise they have run back to the place where their own ancestors once stood. Go, for him, is part of that older wisdom.
From Vietnam Failure to 7-Eleven Success
Chai likes to recount a painful investment failure in Vietnam, and how Go helped him interpret it. On that “battlefield”, the conditions were unfavourable to him; Go reminded him that when the situation is fundamentally bad, you do not have to fight head-on. You must recognise the rhythm of the game and accept that some positions are not worth stubbornly rescuing.
When he returned to Thailand, he was given a tough assignment: to take charge of the 7-Eleven convenience store expansion at a time when employee quality was low and the business was on the verge of collapse. Once again, he leaned on Go.
Instead of wasting energy trying to crush weaker competitors, he focused on building up his own group’s strength. On the Go board, you do not waste powerful moves chasing half-dead weak stones; in business, he believed, it is better to strengthen yourself than to bully weaker shops. Over about twenty years, that mindset helped 7-Eleven Thailand grow from a single store to more than five thousand.
For Chai, Go is not a hobby sitting beside his life; it has become part of his way of seeing the world.
Preaching Go in a “Desert” – Founding the Thai Go Association
When Chai first began, Thailand was basically a Go desert. In 1993, the Thai Go Association was established, with him as its first president. He devoted himself wholeheartedly to promoting Go and treated it as a life mission rather than a side project.
He organised free Go classes and opened them to everyone – from the Thai prime minister’s son to children at schools for people with disabilities. He also worked with other major Thai companies to issue a remarkable public statement:
as long as a young person obtained an amateur 1-dan certificate, those companies would guarantee them a job opportunity.
At universities, whenever he gave a talk, he would first ask the audience to raise their hands if they could play Go. To those who could not, he would advise them to learn quickly, telling them that Go was the best kind of intellectual game and something truly beautiful. If, he said, one reached the end of life without ever having learned Go, there would be a sense of lifelong regret.
A Go Club in Bangkok – And Coaches from China
In Bangkok, Chai opened a Go club and invited strong Chinese professionals to teach. Over the years, he brought in players such as Fang Jie 7-dan and Shi Jinbo 3-dan. Shi, who has been teaching there for several years, learned Thai and now coaches hundreds of students, with some reaching the level of amateur 4-dan.
When international events came to Bangkok, the club became a focal point. During one major world tournament, Chinese 8-dan Wang Runan was invited to give live commentary at the club; the hall was packed, the atmosphere intense. Multi-board simultaneous exhibitions between top players and local fans further raised interest and excitement.
From Zero to One Million: Building a Go Population
Through years of effort, Thai Go changed “from nothing to something, from few to many.” Chai once noted that his Go club had already sold 250,000 Go sets. Assuming four people share one board, that implies roughly one million people in Thailand have been brought into contact with Go.
Within the CP Group alone, several thousand employees can now play. Across the country, countless university students study Go not only to sharpen their minds, but also because holding a Go dan certificate can improve their career prospects – a direct result of Chai’s job-guarantee policy with major companies.
As he puts it, a university graduate with an amateur 1-dan certificate has already demonstrated strong thinking ability, a sense of the big picture, logical reasoning, and good learning capacity – all qualities that are valuable to employers.
Sending Thai Students Abroad to Study Go
The learning boom in Thailand has gone far enough that young Thai players have been sent overseas to study Go full-time. Several Thai students went to Nie Weiping’s famous Go dojo in Beijing. There, their weekly schedule looked like this: Chinese classes at Beijing Foreign Studies University in the morning, then rushing across the city to the Go school at midday to study and train.
Over two years, they rose from the lower training groups (C and D groups) to the higher ones (B and A groups). Above that is the “promotion group”, where at least amateur 5-dan strength is expected. These students later returned home and joined in Go promotion work in Thailand, helping spread what they had learned.
Another talented Thai child was sent to Singapore to study under a Chinese 6-dan professional. For Chai and his team, pushing young Thai players beyond the local ceiling is a crucial next step.
Building Leagues, Cups, and Rating Systems
Under the Thai Go Association, a full competitive structure has been built.
The Thai Go League borrowed heavily from China’s professional league format. Each team has six players; four play in each match. The bottom three teams in the top division drop to the B division, establishing promotion and relegation.
There are four major cup events with different formats: a “King of Go” event with an eight-player round robin and best-of-three final; a “Champion of Champions” event, divided into groups by dan level; a knockout cup; and the MiKu Cup, which separates players into categories such as out-of-town group and entrepreneur group, whose winners later play team relay games to decide the final champion.
The association maintains an internal rating system for all registered players. After each league or cup event, players’ rating changes can be tracked quickly.
To attract more youth, the fourth board in each league team is required to be a young player, ensuring that teenagers are always part of the competition.
From 2017 onward, the association also began testing a Thai middle school Go league, with several schools already playing trial matches. If successful, the plan is to promote it nationwide.
Against this backdrop, Go has begun to attract strong media attention in Thailand, reaching beyond niche circles.
Go as a “Laboratory of Life”
Chai often contrasts Go with Chinese chess (xiangqi). Xiangqi, he says, is like a single, self-contained battle: once the king is checkmated, the game is over and there is no “future”. Go, on the other hand, is composed of multiple battlegrounds whose results affect one another. Even if you win one local fight, heavy losses may hurt the whole board.
In business and life, he believes, the world is closer to Go than to xiangqi. One transaction may bring profit but destroy trust, relationships, or reputation – losses that are hard to repair. True success must be judged by long-term consequences, not just one “victory”.
He also distinguishes policy from strategy. On the Go board, there are many local battles and strategies, but above them must stand a consistent overall policy – much like a company’s central philosophy or attitude toward people. Without a coherent policy, local successes can easily contradict one another and damage the whole.
He stresses respect for opponents and the environment. In Go, if you greedily try to kill every group, throw in forcing moves too early, and underestimate the opponent’s resilience, you often end up overextended and punished. Likewise in business, using resources just to crush rivals can be like “killing ten thousand at the cost of three thousand of your own” – even if you win, you injure yourself badly.
His ideal is closer to the spirit of not fighting blindly: strengthening oneself, building “thickness”, and letting opponents make mistakes. A good business, like a thick Go position, emerges from patience, integrity, and accumulated good decisions, not from grabbing opportunistic advantages.
He even describes the Go board as a “laboratory of life”. On those nineteen lines, he says, one can observe why some people succeed and others fail. You don’t always need a history teacher to tell stories; you can watch cause and effect unfold right in front of you, one stone at a time.
A Life Shaped by Stones
Chai himself began with Chinese chess and a younger man’s desire to overpower opponents. After years of Go, his view of strength changed. Instead of relying on personal brilliance or forcing victory, he came to value people, patience, and thickness. In business, that means respecting subordinates, keeping good relationships, and building structures that outlast any single “battle”.
He now sees wealth and success as something that often arrive indirectly. In Go, if you focus too hard on taking territory everywhere, you may end up thin and overextended. If you play honestly and build solid influence, opportunities emerge naturally. In life, someone who doesn’t chase everything, treats others fairly, and doesn’t cut corners may seem slower in the short term, but accumulates a kind of invisible strength.
For Thailand, Chai Xufeng is the man who took that personal philosophy and turned it into a national Go project: founding associations, guaranteeing jobs, opening clubs, importing coaches, building leagues, sending students abroad, and using his influence to pull Go from obscurity into the mainstream.
On the surface, it is a story about a businessman promoting a board game. But beneath it lies a bigger story: how one person, guided by Go, can reshape not only his own life and company, but also the intellectual landscape of an entire country – one quiet stone at a time, far beyond the board.
