There Will Be Many More "Zhang Xuefeng"

The new career gurus

Zhang Xuefeng (张雪峰) has become shorthand for a new kind of education influencer in China — not a teacher of lofty ideals, but a gatekeeper selling practical routes to stability. It has been reported that Zhang left Beijing in 2021 to start businesses in Suzhou and that he is now linked to 13 companies, serves as legal representative for nine, and oversees more than 1,400 employees. His followers, reportedly, are less interested in emulating his entrepreneurial success than in seizing the tangible security he promises: high-employment majors, cushy public-sector posts (编制), and clear shortcuts out of precarity.

Policy shocks, pivots and personalities

This phenomenon did not emerge in a vacuum. Yu Minhong (俞敏洪), once the face of China’s booming private tutoring sector, is a reminder of how educators can pivot when the ground shifts — from exam prep to livestream commerce, and during the pandemic it has been reported that he donated desks to rural schools. Beijing’s sweeping 2021 “double reduction” crackdown on for-profit K‑12 tutoring erased a business model almost overnight. Where capital and regulation retreat, new actors step in: vocational coaching, career-advice livestreams and offline training crop up to fill the demand.

The debate is both cultural and structural. Advocates argue that some humanities majors and certain training programs are indeed “redundant education capacity” that produce little academic value or employability. Critics counter that framing students’ dreams as mere misdirected fantasy can become a form of elite moralizing — or, as some put it, a sophisticated kind of emotional manipulation. Is telling young people to “choose a safer major” honest guidance or a way to manufacture consent for a narrower set of life paths?

The bigger story is systemic. Regulatory shifts, demographic pressures and stark inequality in education access create fertile ground for more “Zhang Xuefengs.” They sell certainty in an uncertain labor market. They are market responses to policy and social anxiety — and they leave open a question that matters to millions of families: will China’s education and employment systems evolve to expand genuine opportunity, or will entrepreneurial certitude continue to substitute for structural reform?