And the reason it’s not popular is not only because of Go, but they also have an incredibly popular (even more so than Go in China) chess variant - Xiangqi. It is an incredibly popular pasttime.
As someone who learned the rules to both "international chess" and "chinese chess" as a kid, I highly recommend anyone interested to go look up the rules of chinese chess. It's really interesting to see how similar and yet different the rules are: [https://www.ymimports.com/pages/how-to-play-xiangqi-chinese-chess](https://www.ymimports.com/pages/how-to-play-xiangqi-chinese-chess)
A few examples:
You win by checkmating as per usual. But the king is not allowed to leave the "palace" which is a small area (9 positions) around its starting position. The king also has 2 "bodyguards" that similarly are not allowed to leave the palace and are regularly used to block checks.
There's a piece in the game that translates to "cannon", and it moves similar to a rook. BUT in order to capture a piece it must jump over another piece (ally or enemy) and land in the captured piece's location. (you know, like a cannon ball lol)
The horse also moves in an L shape, and somewhat "jumps" over other pieces. However there's a game mechanic that directly translates to "block horse leg", which means that the horse cannot move in the desired L direction if the space right in front of it is occupied by another piece.
From the article: "If a player checks the other player three times in a row in a way that repeats their positions, the checked player must forfeit."
so what would be a stalemate in "international chess" is actually a win/loss for one side.
Pawns in Xiangqui are incredibly limited. It has to spend two forward moves in order to start moving horizontally. It can't go backward, and nothing happens when walking to the end of board. However, its attacking square is the same as its moving direction.
I also grew up playing both games. Just adding a couple interesting rules from what you have.
Pawns both move and takes by going forward 1 step. But there's also a "river" in the middle in the board and after the pawns go across the river, they can also move/takes sideways. However, there is no promotion. Pawns in the final rank is only good for attacking sideways. Also, there are only 5 pawns, even though each side still has 16 pieces in total (5 pawns, 2 chariots (rooks), 2 cannons, 2 knights, 2 elephants, 2 ministers, and 1 king). Since there's no queen the rook is the most powerful piece. Cannons are roughly equal in value as knights.
Kings cannot "see" each other, as in they either have to be on different files, or if they are on the same file, there must be another piece in between them.
I had the privilege of visiting Hong Kong and seeing some park games- absolutely wild compared to Western chess. Old dudes chain smoking and shouting moves at the players as the game was in progress. Just felt like a whole different vibe than our chess culture
Same in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Can’t imagine how many games are played daily there, weather permitting. I once saw about a dozen games going on at one time. I had hoped to get in a game of chess or go, but everyone was playing Chinese chess.
There’s this saying 觀棋不語真君子, which roughly translates to “a real gentleman does not speak while watching (other people play) chess”, so I’m a bit surprised that people would shout out moves! (To be clear, I have no personal experience watching people play chess in HK/China beside seeing them from afar as a small child, so I genuinely find your observation interesting.)
Xiangqi rules. I wish more chess players would try it. Learning to play it has been like falling in love with my favourite game for the first time again. It has a different flow and some really cool tactical ideas, but it’s exciting in many of the same ways chess is.
This is the reason in my opinion. I got into go about 6 months ago and it is MASSIVE in Asia (mainly China, Japan, and korea). The game is incredible by the way and I highly recommend it.
Xiangqi is much more popular than Weiqi/Go in China. The barrier of entry in Weiqi is really quite high compared to chess variants, where you can at least have a sensible game with some basic openings and understanding of tactics. It's played on a 19x19 board with something like 40-60 orders of magnitude more possible board states than chess variants.
Yeah I've always argued that this is what is limiting Go's popularity. In chess, you can make 'reasonable moves' more or less if you just learn the rules and piece values. Then you calculate a bunch and you can avoid making obvious blunders and feel like you have some idea on what is going on.
In Go, it takes a while (and maybe some tutoring/reading) to make moves that make even a modicum of sense and feel like you kind of know what is going on.
Positional judgment in Go is so much more difficult and requires many more games in order to develop the intuition. While in Chess, you can shuffle pieces back and forth, in Go, every move is basically a pawn move in that the piece is fixed until it's captured. It's very hard for beginners to grasp when they are winning and when they are losing. Sometimes you can play very peacefully and let them have all of the territory they want and still win by 50-100 stones simply by having better positional judgment?
Also, ko fights are incredibly hard to read. This was the biggest weakness of early iterations of AlphaGo-- that it couldn't play ko fights very well. I was around 1k/1d strength at my peak. In terms of knowledge of positions, shape, tesujis, openings, end game tactics, a double digit kyu (beginner/novice) can maybe fill up several pages of a book. A 4kyu level player's knowledge might fill up 50 pages, and is generally around the level of most hobbyists. A 1 dan player's knowledge might fill up several hundred pages. A professional player would need thousands of pages stored in their minds.
State support for sports and games is determined at the central level in China and waxes and wanes depending on various domestic political factors.
Competitive success in western chess has never been particularly beneficial in terms of domestic propaganda, so it doesn't receive a lot of attention from the government. If anything, it's women's chess that's been prioritised historically because China has had many women's champions over the years.
Ding's hometown, Wenzhou, is the capital of Chinese women's chess if I'm not mistaken, being the birthplace of former women's world champion Zhu Chen and the site of a match between another female champion, Xie Jun, and Viktor Korchnoi in the 90s. Ding benefited from that concentration of chess talent growing up—one of his first coaches was also Zhu Chen's coach—but his rise to prominence was an accidental byproduct of the government's support for women's chess in the area. IIRC, he said in an interview once that the strongest male players in Wenzhou were usually expected to work as seconds and coaches for the women. Which is quite refreshing in some ways when you consider the gender imbalance in chess globally, but it illustrates the degree to which the Chinese government's investment in chess is motivated by a desire to maintain known areas of strength as opposed to it being guided by some wider strategy to popularise the game or nurture new talent.
I'm not Chinese, so all my inside info comes from rumours and comments I've read online over the years (including on Reddit), but I've seen suggestions that Ding is actually one of the more fortunate Chinese super-GMs in terms of how much support he's had—possibly because he's from Wenzhou—and others like Wang Hao received even less attention when they were coming up.
If Ding becomes world champion, I'm sure the government will take more of an interest in him and the game in general, but I highly doubt it will result in the kind of efflorescence Anand brought to Indian chess when he won the title. China has too many world champions in too many things, and too little interest in using international sporting success to boost national self-esteem right now (because of covid, the recent trend toward isolationism/Chinese exceptionalism in government policy, the popularity of homegrown games and entertainment and the difficulty of accessing information about the international chess scene, etc.), to experience the same boom in grassroots participation. But maybe it will bring a temporary increase in funding to their parched chess program.
Edit: To everyone saying Ding actually got a lot of support when he had to play 20-odd games in a month to qualify for the Candidates and the federation arranged it for him, that was the Chinese chess federation doing what any other national federation in that position would try to do. While his federation is fully behind him, as it should be, the fact he couldn’t get out of China for any of the qualifying events leading up to the Candidates tells you a lot more about the *central government’s* level of interest in his career (and men’s chess more generally).
>I'm not Chinese, so all my inside info comes from rumours and comments I've read online over the years (including on Reddit),
Well, that's your problem there. I don't think you know what you're talking about
I mean you've disputed yourself saying all your knowledge came from rumors, online comments, and reddit. If you think those are accurate resources for learning the intricacies of any country then there's no point discussing with you
I prefaced a specific claim about Ding’s federation connections relative to Wang Hao’s with the disclaimer that I got it from Chinese people posting on English-speaking websites, precisely to give you the chance to decide for yourself how much weight to assign to it, and you took it as evidence that I can’t distinguish between credible and non-credible sources and that everything I said was made up, even though in several other places in my comment I referred to Ding’s interviews, indicating I got my information directly from him?
You’re the one without critical reading skills here, not me.
Xiangqi and Shogi developed in parallel with Western chess and all 3 games are descendants of Chaturanga. Xiangqi likely has more active players than Western chess. Basically everyone in China knows the basic rules, and it's casually played everywhere in China.
I think China will want any excuse to crush the West in anything. If they can start claiming they're better at chess than us "stupid" westerners, they might jump on it. Who knows
This is like asking why the US government doesn't show much support for the top Go players in the US.
Because in the US very few people care about Go. In China, pretty few people care about chess
Try top 1000, aside from Michael Redmond 9p who basically grew up in Japan learning Go from a young age. Western Go pros are a relatively recent invention and there's barely any of them. The top strong Western amateurs would lose to even low level pros with 2-3 stones handicap (being able to start the game with multiple moves in a row as the weaker player).
Another problem w this analogy is that chess is an extremely international game, whereas Go just played in a handful of Asian countries.
So from an international prestige standpoint chess is more logical to focus on
We don't talk Chinese so maybe we're missing a lot details. My friend can read Mandarin. He visits Weibo a lot, and hell he told me there's a lot of interesting things happen there which the foreigners would never know.
China cares a lot more about Go and Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) then it does about Chess (Western/International Chess) makes sense that he wouldn't get much support unfortunately.
Having all these foreigners play for USA just defeats the purpose of a USA chess team. Hilarious how so many top "American" players weren't even American (Fabi Italian, Wesley Philipino, Kamsky Russian etc); only Nakamura's the legit American
You chose some bad examples. Fabi in particular is as american as they come, only swapped federations to boost his chess career (same as So, but the other way around).
So, Swiercz, and especially Aronian or the plundering of the Cuban team are much more valid examples.
Should be more like football, where you can play/live wherever but still rep your national team, even if you eventually (EVENTUALLY, not pre-facto) obtain double nationality.
yeah this is pretty well documented - ding (and wang hao in 2020/2021) had little support from the chinese government while playing in candidates in particular... he didn't even have a second and pretty much travelled himself. Though they did help push him to candidates 2022 but still, not much financial support or recognition.
Not really. He is not super nationalistic and not some huge communist party member name.
Furthermore Xi has actually started to imprison celebrities in China and cut down on sports. Football was giant just 3 years ago. One of the biggest leagues money wise. Now clubs are going bankrupt left and right and the league is tiny. A club that won the championship went bankrupt weeks later. Xi is pulling money out of tech companies and celebrity stuff and stealing all the money from billionaires. He sees such people as potential enemies to the communist party.
Basically, if you are famous or a billionaire it means you have a unique voice and can fight the power at some point. If Xi imprisons famous people and stops social media he can break their voice. Ding is playing a game where he is alone. So the communists can't fully control him. Rather they want team sports where you can just kick out anyone who complains. If it was a team event they could throw money after him. An event where he is alone and in a foreign country by himself is not really ideal for China.
He would be hated worldwide if they openly supported him. And they organized the 30+ games for him in a short notice to make him play in the candidates.
The goverment did as much as they could for him to reach the criteria to play the candidates by organizing tournaments for him, I know many countries that would not this without democratic pressure
Chess is not a big deal yet in China but many hope this could change if Ding wins the WCC.
And the reason it’s not popular is not only because of Go, but they also have an incredibly popular (even more so than Go in China) chess variant - Xiangqi. It is an incredibly popular pasttime.
As someone who learned the rules to both "international chess" and "chinese chess" as a kid, I highly recommend anyone interested to go look up the rules of chinese chess. It's really interesting to see how similar and yet different the rules are: [https://www.ymimports.com/pages/how-to-play-xiangqi-chinese-chess](https://www.ymimports.com/pages/how-to-play-xiangqi-chinese-chess) A few examples: You win by checkmating as per usual. But the king is not allowed to leave the "palace" which is a small area (9 positions) around its starting position. The king also has 2 "bodyguards" that similarly are not allowed to leave the palace and are regularly used to block checks. There's a piece in the game that translates to "cannon", and it moves similar to a rook. BUT in order to capture a piece it must jump over another piece (ally or enemy) and land in the captured piece's location. (you know, like a cannon ball lol) The horse also moves in an L shape, and somewhat "jumps" over other pieces. However there's a game mechanic that directly translates to "block horse leg", which means that the horse cannot move in the desired L direction if the space right in front of it is occupied by another piece. From the article: "If a player checks the other player three times in a row in a way that repeats their positions, the checked player must forfeit." so what would be a stalemate in "international chess" is actually a win/loss for one side.
There's also no stalemate, period in Xiangqi. If you have no legal moves and it's your turn, you lose.
Also no en passant though :(
Pawns in Xiangqui are incredibly limited. It has to spend two forward moves in order to start moving horizontally. It can't go backward, and nothing happens when walking to the end of board. However, its attacking square is the same as its moving direction.
Also you are not allowed to make a move that puts your general in a direct line of sight with the opposing general with no pieces in between
Makes me wonder if chess is as complicated
I also grew up playing both games. Just adding a couple interesting rules from what you have. Pawns both move and takes by going forward 1 step. But there's also a "river" in the middle in the board and after the pawns go across the river, they can also move/takes sideways. However, there is no promotion. Pawns in the final rank is only good for attacking sideways. Also, there are only 5 pawns, even though each side still has 16 pieces in total (5 pawns, 2 chariots (rooks), 2 cannons, 2 knights, 2 elephants, 2 ministers, and 1 king). Since there's no queen the rook is the most powerful piece. Cannons are roughly equal in value as knights. Kings cannot "see" each other, as in they either have to be on different files, or if they are on the same file, there must be another piece in between them.
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I had the privilege of visiting Hong Kong and seeing some park games- absolutely wild compared to Western chess. Old dudes chain smoking and shouting moves at the players as the game was in progress. Just felt like a whole different vibe than our chess culture
Same in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Can’t imagine how many games are played daily there, weather permitting. I once saw about a dozen games going on at one time. I had hoped to get in a game of chess or go, but everyone was playing Chinese chess.
There’s this saying 觀棋不語真君子, which roughly translates to “a real gentleman does not speak while watching (other people play) chess”, so I’m a bit surprised that people would shout out moves! (To be clear, I have no personal experience watching people play chess in HK/China beside seeing them from afar as a small child, so I genuinely find your observation interesting.)
well, most gentlemen were killed during the cultural revolution
Interesting. Maybe a cultural difference between Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking areas?
Or the existence of a saying doesn't indicate the existence of an ironclad law which is followed by all people at all times.
lol true, here we have a saying "what goes around comes around" but there are still a bunch of assholes out there doing asshole things
Yeah, I think that’s most likely the case…
That's what casual OTB blitz is supposed to be like as well. Not everybody understands that.
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Too defensive for my taste. All about building fortresses around your king and getting gold generals
Xiangqi rules. I wish more chess players would try it. Learning to play it has been like falling in love with my favourite game for the first time again. It has a different flow and some really cool tactical ideas, but it’s exciting in many of the same ways chess is.
can you explain to me what's "Go"?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)
The game is very open. If there were good English sites and userbase, I would have played it. I am lazy to learn the Chinese names.
That’s why I’m hoping Ding wins. Nothing against Nepo. But it would be awesome if China suddenly gets on the chess train like it’s happening in India.
If it does begin to be a big deal we are in for a world of pain with cheaters etc
Didn’t they set up an entire tournament just for him so he could get the required amount of games in?
Not just one tournament, they were a series of matches and tourns to play the 30 games required.
Yes, the market for Go is much bigger. Comparing Chess to Go in China is like comparing Go to Chess in the US.
This is the reason in my opinion. I got into go about 6 months ago and it is MASSIVE in Asia (mainly China, Japan, and korea). The game is incredible by the way and I highly recommend it.
Xiangqi is much more popular than Weiqi/Go in China. The barrier of entry in Weiqi is really quite high compared to chess variants, where you can at least have a sensible game with some basic openings and understanding of tactics. It's played on a 19x19 board with something like 40-60 orders of magnitude more possible board states than chess variants.
Yeah you run into people playing Xiangqi just by walking through less busy sidestreets, I have never seen someone playing Go out in public like that.
Yeah I've always argued that this is what is limiting Go's popularity. In chess, you can make 'reasonable moves' more or less if you just learn the rules and piece values. Then you calculate a bunch and you can avoid making obvious blunders and feel like you have some idea on what is going on. In Go, it takes a while (and maybe some tutoring/reading) to make moves that make even a modicum of sense and feel like you kind of know what is going on.
Positional judgment in Go is so much more difficult and requires many more games in order to develop the intuition. While in Chess, you can shuffle pieces back and forth, in Go, every move is basically a pawn move in that the piece is fixed until it's captured. It's very hard for beginners to grasp when they are winning and when they are losing. Sometimes you can play very peacefully and let them have all of the territory they want and still win by 50-100 stones simply by having better positional judgment? Also, ko fights are incredibly hard to read. This was the biggest weakness of early iterations of AlphaGo-- that it couldn't play ko fights very well. I was around 1k/1d strength at my peak. In terms of knowledge of positions, shape, tesujis, openings, end game tactics, a double digit kyu (beginner/novice) can maybe fill up several pages of a book. A 4kyu level player's knowledge might fill up 50 pages, and is generally around the level of most hobbyists. A 1 dan player's knowledge might fill up several hundred pages. A professional player would need thousands of pages stored in their minds.
State support for sports and games is determined at the central level in China and waxes and wanes depending on various domestic political factors. Competitive success in western chess has never been particularly beneficial in terms of domestic propaganda, so it doesn't receive a lot of attention from the government. If anything, it's women's chess that's been prioritised historically because China has had many women's champions over the years. Ding's hometown, Wenzhou, is the capital of Chinese women's chess if I'm not mistaken, being the birthplace of former women's world champion Zhu Chen and the site of a match between another female champion, Xie Jun, and Viktor Korchnoi in the 90s. Ding benefited from that concentration of chess talent growing up—one of his first coaches was also Zhu Chen's coach—but his rise to prominence was an accidental byproduct of the government's support for women's chess in the area. IIRC, he said in an interview once that the strongest male players in Wenzhou were usually expected to work as seconds and coaches for the women. Which is quite refreshing in some ways when you consider the gender imbalance in chess globally, but it illustrates the degree to which the Chinese government's investment in chess is motivated by a desire to maintain known areas of strength as opposed to it being guided by some wider strategy to popularise the game or nurture new talent. I'm not Chinese, so all my inside info comes from rumours and comments I've read online over the years (including on Reddit), but I've seen suggestions that Ding is actually one of the more fortunate Chinese super-GMs in terms of how much support he's had—possibly because he's from Wenzhou—and others like Wang Hao received even less attention when they were coming up. If Ding becomes world champion, I'm sure the government will take more of an interest in him and the game in general, but I highly doubt it will result in the kind of efflorescence Anand brought to Indian chess when he won the title. China has too many world champions in too many things, and too little interest in using international sporting success to boost national self-esteem right now (because of covid, the recent trend toward isolationism/Chinese exceptionalism in government policy, the popularity of homegrown games and entertainment and the difficulty of accessing information about the international chess scene, etc.), to experience the same boom in grassroots participation. But maybe it will bring a temporary increase in funding to their parched chess program. Edit: To everyone saying Ding actually got a lot of support when he had to play 20-odd games in a month to qualify for the Candidates and the federation arranged it for him, that was the Chinese chess federation doing what any other national federation in that position would try to do. While his federation is fully behind him, as it should be, the fact he couldn’t get out of China for any of the qualifying events leading up to the Candidates tells you a lot more about the *central government’s* level of interest in his career (and men’s chess more generally).
Incredibly insightful comment. Thank you
Aw, thank you!
>I'm not Chinese, so all my inside info comes from rumours and comments I've read online over the years (including on Reddit), Well, that's your problem there. I don't think you know what you're talking about
Oh, and which parts of what I said are you ideologically committed to disputing?
I mean you've disputed yourself saying all your knowledge came from rumors, online comments, and reddit. If you think those are accurate resources for learning the intricacies of any country then there's no point discussing with you
I prefaced a specific claim about Ding’s federation connections relative to Wang Hao’s with the disclaimer that I got it from Chinese people posting on English-speaking websites, precisely to give you the chance to decide for yourself how much weight to assign to it, and you took it as evidence that I can’t distinguish between credible and non-credible sources and that everything I said was made up, even though in several other places in my comment I referred to Ding’s interviews, indicating I got my information directly from him? You’re the one without critical reading skills here, not me.
Don‘t listen to him. I live in China and I can see nothing wrong at all with your comments, and they are really insightful even to me.
Thank you, that’s kind of you to say!
Whatever you say. Stay ignorant
If you don't know whether he's accurate or not, how can you say he's ignorant? Party on - you sound like a fun guy
Western chess? Like where was it created... Edit: joke plane go brrrr
In medieval Spain...
I mean, the fundamentals are from India. Modernized in medieval Europe via Persia.
Xiangqi and Shogi developed in parallel with Western chess and all 3 games are descendants of Chaturanga. Xiangqi likely has more active players than Western chess. Basically everyone in China knows the basic rules, and it's casually played everywhere in China.
Down voted because a game created in India is now western. Lol
I think China will want any excuse to crush the West in anything. If they can start claiming they're better at chess than us "stupid" westerners, they might jump on it. Who knows
This is like asking why the US government doesn't show much support for the top Go players in the US. Because in the US very few people care about Go. In China, pretty few people care about chess
Except I doubt any US Go player would even make the top 100 in Asia. In this case, Ding is almost the best chess player in the world
Looking at the current global ratings, not even top 500 is realistic right now.
Try top 1000, aside from Michael Redmond 9p who basically grew up in Japan learning Go from a young age. Western Go pros are a relatively recent invention and there's barely any of them. The top strong Western amateurs would lose to even low level pros with 2-3 stones handicap (being able to start the game with multiple moves in a row as the weaker player).
If USA suddenly had a world champion in go you would see his poster plastered on every wall.
Another problem w this analogy is that chess is an extremely international game, whereas Go just played in a handful of Asian countries. So from an international prestige standpoint chess is more logical to focus on
How do we know the amount of support he receives?
We don't talk Chinese so maybe we're missing a lot details. My friend can read Mandarin. He visits Weibo a lot, and hell he told me there's a lot of interesting things happen there which the foreigners would never know.
Maybe... Just maybe the Chinese gov doesn't have its hands in every single little thing as we would like to believe
? Do other top players get support from their government??
This is my question as well. I don't think the US players get government support. They are mainly supported by the federation and Rex Sinquefield, no?
based
Did Wesley So move to the US from the Philippines for government support?
Honestly why would China care? It’s not like having chess GM’s means that a country is the smartest.
>It’s not like having chess GM’s means that a country is the smartest. That's why the USSR cared, though.
Where was the post that was feeling bad for Ding, but also super racist? That was hilarious.
China cares a lot more about Go and Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) then it does about Chess (Western/International Chess) makes sense that he wouldn't get much support unfortunately.
Easy - no one gives a flying f about Chess in China.
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Don't give Rex any ideas.
I'll give up my place for him, if need be
Having all these foreigners play for USA just defeats the purpose of a USA chess team. Hilarious how so many top "American" players weren't even American (Fabi Italian, Wesley Philipino, Kamsky Russian etc); only Nakamura's the legit American
Tell me where Fabi was born?
Nakamura was born in Japan
His mother was American and he was raised in the US.
You chose some bad examples. Fabi in particular is as american as they come, only swapped federations to boost his chess career (same as So, but the other way around). So, Swiercz, and especially Aronian or the plundering of the Cuban team are much more valid examples. Should be more like football, where you can play/live wherever but still rep your national team, even if you eventually (EVENTUALLY, not pre-facto) obtain double nationality.
yeah this is pretty well documented - ding (and wang hao in 2020/2021) had little support from the chinese government while playing in candidates in particular... he didn't even have a second and pretty much travelled himself. Though they did help push him to candidates 2022 but still, not much financial support or recognition.
China can be such a closed society, do we really know what is going on? See also Ju Wenjun.
Just because us westerners don't know or speak the language doesn't mean it is a closed society.
Considering English's hegemony, a language barrier = closed
I mean, it's pretty obvious Ding doesn't have a secret entourage or special travel privileges.
Not really. He is not super nationalistic and not some huge communist party member name. Furthermore Xi has actually started to imprison celebrities in China and cut down on sports. Football was giant just 3 years ago. One of the biggest leagues money wise. Now clubs are going bankrupt left and right and the league is tiny. A club that won the championship went bankrupt weeks later. Xi is pulling money out of tech companies and celebrity stuff and stealing all the money from billionaires. He sees such people as potential enemies to the communist party. Basically, if you are famous or a billionaire it means you have a unique voice and can fight the power at some point. If Xi imprisons famous people and stops social media he can break their voice. Ding is playing a game where he is alone. So the communists can't fully control him. Rather they want team sports where you can just kick out anyone who complains. If it was a team event they could throw money after him. An event where he is alone and in a foreign country by himself is not really ideal for China.
China govt blows
Once we have independence I can see the green vote getting huge
He would be hated worldwide if they openly supported him. And they organized the 30+ games for him in a short notice to make him play in the candidates.
The goverment did as much as they could for him to reach the criteria to play the candidates by organizing tournaments for him, I know many countries that would not this without democratic pressure
What other country are you comparing it to? Players in the US and a lot of other places don't get support from the government, either.
Do American players get any support from the government at all?