He Ran a Knifeman Down With His Scooter, Finished His Shift, and Became a Video-Game Hero
A 21-year-old delivery rider in Xining interrupted his shift to knock down a man brandishing a knife in the street, then went back to delivering food. The platform gave him a cash award; the game Honor of Kings went further and minted him a playful national title.
For a few days in late August, the country's most-played video game and its most invisible workforce briefly agreed on the same idea of heroism.
The story begins in Xining, in the northwestern province of Qinghai, on August 20. A man was seen running through the streets with a knife, threatening passersby. Nearby, a 21-year-old delivery rider named Yu Rongxian was mid-shift. He later described his decision to Jiupai News with the flat economy of someone tallying stops: he set his food order aside, swung around behind the man on his electric scooter, and knocked him over.
"Seeing a man running around waving a knife, I felt I had to do something," he said. Then, in the detail that made the story, he went back to his route. The food still had to arrive.
The reward system came from two directions at once. His delivery platform gave Yu a "Pioneer Rider" banner and 5,000 yuan in cash, and his station threw him a birthday party — it happened to be his 21st. The more memorable honor came from Honor of Kings, the multiplayer game whose Chinese title, Wangzhe Rongyao, is about as close as the country gets to a shared cultural operating system.
The game's operator posted a nationwide appeal to find the "Guofu Sun Ce" delivery rider. The joke was a pun his scooter earned instantly. In the game, Sun Ce is a hero whose iconic move is a charging dash that knocks opponents off their feet — and the slang for unleashing it, "kai da," is the same verb news outlets used for how he gunned the throttle. "Driving an electric scooter to ult," one blogger posted, and the meme assembled itself. The company wanted to send him a "Sun Ce exclusive gift" and a custom certificate naming him a national-server Sun Ce — the game's highest, mostly tongue-in-cheek, competitive rank.
The honor was absurd on its face and entirely sincere. This is how Chinese internet culture tends to express gratitude: through the shared vocabulary of whatever everyone plays on the bus.
There is a quieter story underneath the meme. Delivery riders are everywhere in Chinese cities and mostly unseen, compressed by algorithms and celebrated, paradoxically, precisely because no one expects the person carrying your lunch to also be the person who rides toward a knife. The fact that Yu treated the whole episode as a minor detour — tackle, then deliver — was the part that landed hardest. He never stopped being a courier; he just briefly amended the itinerary.
The episode doesn't resolve anything about courier working conditions or street violence. But for one evening, a city of millions learned the name of the man on the scooter, and the game that speaks the country's internet best offered the only reward it could think of that he might actually grin at: a made-up title, because between deliveries it was the one form of recognition he would recognize as a compliment.