🇨🇳 Zhang Xinyang

A childhood built for exams

Zhang Xinyang (张炘炀) was born in 1995 in Panjin, a mid-sized city in China’s Liaoning province. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father, Zhang Huixiang, a civil servant, later wrote a book about how he had trained his son. By the family’s account the boy knew more than a thousand Chinese characters before he was three.

What followed was acceleration by design. He started primary school at five, was moved up a grade within a month and reached fifth grade within about six months. He raced through junior middle school, skipped the first two years of senior high and entered its final year before he turned nine. His father was frank about the method: exam-oriented education was a reality, he said, and the only option was to face it and get the child to the goal. The family bought practice papers by the stack; when the boy finished high school, his father sold the used ones as scrap paper for more than 100 yuan.

“I was small, so I always sat in the front row and ate plenty of chalk dust,” he told China Youth Daily at sixteen (translated from Chinese). His biggest regret, he added, was never having toiled through high school the way other students did.

University at ten

In June 2005, aged ten, he sat the gaokao, China’s national university entrance examination, and scored 505 out of 750 — the figure China Youth Daily reported in 2011; some later accounts say 510. He was admitted to the Tianjin University of Technology and Education. China Daily called his entry at ten a record in China. His diary entry for June 8, 2005, translated from Chinese, read: “Exam-oriented education is finally over!”

Campus life was harder. His family stayed close by, according to later accounts, and a boy of ten had little in common with classmates twice his age. He finished the undergraduate coursework in three years. One of his teachers, Zhang Yuehui, recalled that a professor had arranged a graduate place for him in Germany — but he was too young: students had to be at least fourteen to study there alone. The teachers urged his father to wait a year. His father insisted on going straight on to a master’s degree.

A master’s student at thirteen

In 2008, at thirteen, Zhang began a master’s degree in mathematics at the Beijing University of Technology. He later described spending four days on a single problem, only to discover it was simple. His former teacher Zhang Yuehui’s assessment was pointed: he was strong at studying on his own and very poor at living on his own, because his father had done everything for him.

The apartment ultimatum

In 2011, as he finished the master’s degree, Zhang gave his parents an ultimatum: buy an apartment in Beijing outright — about 90 square meters, worth roughly two million yuan — or he would not defend his thesis or sit the doctoral entrance exam. His parents rented a flat and told him they had bought it. On September 1, 2011, aged sixteen, he enrolled as a doctoral student in applied mathematics at Beihang University.

The story became national news when China Central Television broadcast an interview with him on October 16, 2011. “When I finish my PhD I won’t even have a place to live,” he said on air, in remarks translated from Chinese. “What use is a PhD? What use is a postdoc?” A psychologist called the demand revenge for a lost childhood; the Global Times ran an opinion piece defending him as a young man reacting to Beijing’s housing prices. Quoted by China Daily a month later, he was disarmingly modest: “I’m nothing outstanding. I know how to pass exams.” He wanted, he said, a flat, a Beijing household registration and a good job — and would rather take a low-paid post at an air-conditioned research institute than a competitive high-paying one.

Eight years to a doctorate

The doctorate took eight years. Zhang published his first paper in an indexed science journal in 2017 and a second in 2019; one of his former teachers said the paper requirement delayed him by about five years. Beihang conferred his PhD in 2019, when he was about 24.

He then taught on contract at Ningxia Normal University, in China’s northwest, until August 2021, when he resigned and began taking freelance projects with friends.

“I never took off”

In September 2023, at 28, Zhang gave a long interview to Jiupai News. He had no fixed job and a few thousand yuan in the bank, and his parents sent him 10,000 yuan every two or three months. The apartment still rankled. “They still owe me a Beijing apartment,” he said, adding that by now it should be worth more than ten million yuan. He also said he was content — “no job, no burden,” in his words — and that he could go his whole life without working.

Asked about the “fallen prodigy” label that Chinese media had pinned on him, he rejected its premise: “I never took off — so how can anyone talk about a fall?” His old teacher Zhang Yuehui offered a gentler image: “Maybe he really is a plane that could fly ten thousand li, but he never left the runway — he’s still taxiing.” The Beijing News drew a wider lesson, calling prodigy education at root adult-centered, “a denial of childhood.” (Quotations translated from Chinese.)

Where is Zhang Xinyang now?

The last report by a mainstream outlet dates from late 2023. In February 2026, several Chinese self-media accounts relayed a blogger’s interview in which Zhang, about 30, was said to be working as a research assistant at a university in Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, with his family settled in Tianjin. In that account he said his parents no longer owed him an apartment: he had food, clothes and a roof, and was content. No mainstream outlet has confirmed the interview, and this page treats it as unverified.

Born in 1995, he is 30 or 31 in 2026. His birthday has not been published.