China’s hunger for the unvarnished
In an age of puffed-up rhetoric, two men stood out by sounding unprocessed
At the end of March, China fixated on two men. One was mourned. Zhang Xuefeng, the country’s most famous adviser on university majors and admissions, died suddenly on March 24 after collapsing while exercising at work. The other was celebrated. ZXMOTO, founded by Zhang Xue, a former mechanic, won twice on a world championship circuit, turning a niche motorcycle brand into a national sensation almost overnight. One belonged to the anxious world of gaokao, jobs and class mobility. The other belonged to engines, risk and manufacturing ambition.
Both came from decidedly unglamorous beginnings. Zhang Xuefeng grew up in a poor county in China’s north-east and went not to one of the country’s grandest universities. Zhang Xue was born in a poor village, saw his parents split up early, grew up in hardship and started work as a repair-shop apprentice while still a teenager. Later he scraped together 20,000 yuan ($2,900) and went to Chongqing, a southwestern metropolis, to build a business around motorcycles. Their biographies did not make them unique. China is full of people from hard places. But they helped make both men believable.
Zhang Xuefeng became powerful because he filled a real need. China asks families to make life-shaping decisions about majors and careers in a system that is opaque, crowded, and stratified. He turned that fog into something ordinary people could act on. He did not speak the soft language of self-discovery. He spoke in the hard language of odds, returns and class constraints. He warned students away from journalism in language so blunt it caused a national argument. He also argued that finance was a bad bet for families without capital, elite credentials or access to networks. The substance of those remarks was not especially refined, and often not especially fair. But millions of people recognised the underlying instinct: he was describing a world in which class, information and connections matter, and in which many teenagers are asked to make life-shaping decisions long before they understand the rules.
Zhang Xue’s rise answered a different hunger. His appeal was not that of a counsellor but of a folk hero from the workshop floor: a boy from nowhere, obsessed with motorbikes, who fought his way into racing, then manufacturing, then entrepreneurship, and ended up with a motorcycle bearing his name winning on the world stage. That story would have spread even if he had been polished and bland. Success is persuasive. So is the spectacle of a Chinese brand beating established foreign names in a field where prestige still matters.
But success was not enough. What also helped him break out was the way he sounded. He was later asked what support Chongqing had given him as an outsider entrepreneur. Not even a cent, he said, necessitating immediate damage control from the Party’s mouthpiece. Asked how it felt to go from chasing reporters years ago to being chased by them now, he replied that if they were not connected, they would not even be in the room - he did not really want to do the interview. Then came the usual invitation to say something uplifting for confused young people. He batted that away too: he was not good at that sort of line. It was graceless, funny, and unmistakably alive.
That sort of exchange lands in China because the country has had more than enough of the opposite. Every society produces inflated public language. China is not unusual in that. And the authorities that still set much of the national agenda are especially given to it. Since power retains such influence over headlines, tone and acceptable expression, official language seeps everywhere: abstract, uplifting, ceremonial and often empty. Even the system itself has a name for the problem—jia da kong, or fake-big-empty talk.
That is why “authenticity” matters here, though it is not the whole explanation. Both men had obvious reasons to be admired. Zhang Xuefeng gave anxious families a usable map. Zhang Xue built a company and a machine that could win. But those achievements alone do not produce this level of attachment. What made both men larger than their niches was that they seemed to speak before the performance had time to arrive. Zhang Xuefeng sounded like a man too impatient to flatter his audience. Zhang Xue sounded like a man too uninterested to pretend. In an age of slogans, that carries unusual force.
This is also why their roughness helped rather than hurt them. Not because they were somehow unlovable in the ordinary sense. On the contrary, both inspired affection for clear reasons: one because he tried to spare ordinary families expensive illusions, the other because he turned a battered beginning into something tangible and victorious. What pushed them beyond admiration into something closer to devotion was that their rough edges felt unmanufactured. People did not just like what they did. They believed the person speaking.
So the two Zhangs belong together, even if they came from different worlds. One dealt in admissions, employability and the grim arithmetic of social mobility. The other dealt in speed, engineering and the fantasy that grit and competence can still punch through hierarchy. Both would have mattered anyway. What made them erupt across the internet was something simpler. In a culture saturated with polished uplift and official puffery, people are hungry for speech with some blood in it. A blunt line can travel further than a beautiful one. A refusal to sound inspirational can be more inspiring than the usual sermon. (Enditem)
In such a large country, not everyone has been lying flat?