The middle leg of the 1963 China–USSR match was played at the Shanghai Sports Club between 16 and 20 September: three rounds, nine games, three Chinese players against three Soviets. The visitors won it 6½–2½. But in the last round Huang Xinzhai, a young Shanghai player, beat Vladimir Zagorovsky — the only Chinese victory in all twenty-four games of the match.
Nine games at the Sports Club
China had invited the Soviet team for a return visit five years after three Soviet masters swept a short match in Guangzhou in December 1958. To prepare, the National Sports Committee assembled a training squad of more than twenty players between 14 June and 15 July 1963 and picked eight from the qualifying tournament that followed. The Soviet side was Andor Lilienthal, Mikhail Yudovich and Vladimir Zagorovsky, and it opened the tour with three rounds at the Yuexin Palace in Beijing's Beihai Garden from 8 to 12 September, winning six of the nine games and drawing three.
In Shanghai the visitors met a new Chinese trio — Xu Hongshun, Huang Xinzhai and Li Zhongjian — under a scheme in which each home player faced each visitor once across the rounds of 16, 18 and 20 September. Yudovich and Lilienthal each took 2½ from 3; Zagorovsky, held to a draw by Xu Hongshun on the 18th and beaten by Huang two days later, finished on 1½. The 2½ points China scored here were its best return of the three legs. The match then moved to Hangzhou for two closing rounds and ended 19–5 to the Soviet Union: fifteen wins, eight draws, one loss. All nine Shanghai games are preserved here.
Huang Xinzhai's point
In the sixth round of the match, on 20 September, Huang Xinzhai beat Zagorovsky with the white pieces. His opponent was no ordinary visiting master: Zagorovsky held the ICCF world correspondence championship from 1962 to 1965, and was the reigning correspondence world champion when he sat down in Shanghai. It was the single win China took in the whole twenty-four-game match.
Huang had come to the board from xiangqi, winning the Shanghai secondary-school xiangqi championship in 1957, and learned the international game from Xie Xiaxun — the veteran who had held Alekhine to a draw in a Shanghai exhibition in 1933 and who lived to 101. Huang won the chess title at Shanghai's 2nd National Games in 1959; two years after beating Zagorovsky he became Chinese champion.
Chess, as distinct from xiangqi, had only been recognised as a competitive sport in China in 1956, and the Chess Association of China had been founded the year before this match, in 1962, as a minor affiliate of the Chinese Xiangqi Association; it did not become an independent body until 1986. Within three years of the Shanghai match the game was banned outright for the first eight years of the Cultural Revolution, and China would not play international chess again until the mid-1970s.
Result
We have 9 games from this event. The full results are not known, so there is no cross table; the games are listed in source order.