By Jane Sonnenschein · August 4, 2026

“No one’s success is ever the product of a single education system.”

After the 2026 Fields Medals were announced, Wang Hong and Deng Yu became the two winners who attracted the most attention on the Chinese internet. The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to young mathematicians who have already made outstanding contributions to mathematics and are considered to have significant potential for further work. Wang Hong received the award for her research in areas including harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, and the three-dimensional Kakeya problem, becoming the third woman in the history of the Fields Medal to win the prize.

Soon afterwards, articles and videos about her upbringing and academic journey began appearing everywhere.

She entered Peking University at sixteen. But she did not initially get into the mathematics department she most wanted to attend. Instead, she entered the School of Earth and Space Sciences. Later, after passing an internal transfer examination, she moved into the School of Mathematical Sciences. After graduating from Peking University, she went to École Polytechnique in France, then completed her PhD at MIT, and eventually became a highly respected mathematician on the international stage.

That story was already rich enough to be worth discussing.

But once it reached the internet, it was quickly reshaped into a much more familiar narrative:

She had been suppressed by the Chinese education system and lost confidence among a group of competition prodigies. Then she went to France, met a good teacher who knew how to encourage students, rediscovered her love of mathematics, and later moved to the United States, where a freer and more supportive academic environment finally allowed her talent to flourish. Eventually, she won the Fields Medal.

Once the story is told this way, the conclusion seems almost automatic:

Look. Chinese education is all about exams, competition, and discouragement. Real talent only has a chance to be seen once it leaves China.

It is a compelling story. It has conflict, struggle, repression, and rescue. It is almost perfectly designed for short videos and social-media articles.

But can a person’s development really be explained by such a simple chain of cause and effect?

Real lives rarely have one clear moment of “rescue”

According to the more complete accounts currently available, Wang Hong’s experience was far more complicated than “suppressed in China, saved abroad.”

When she took China’s national college entrance examination in Guangxi, Peking University had very few mathematics places available in the province. Her score was not high enough to enter the mathematics department directly, so she first enrolled in the School of Earth and Space Sciences.

But she already knew, when she entered Peking University, that students had the possibility of changing majors. From the beginning, she intended to work toward transferring into mathematics.

It is also worth noting that her geophysics teacher did not try to stop her. On the contrary, the teacher encouraged her to study mathematics and told her that mathematics was also essential for understanding the Earth sciences.

She later passed the examination and successfully transferred into mathematics.

Her grades at Peking University were not among the very best. Surrounded by large numbers of mathematics competition winners and exceptionally talented students, she sometimes wondered whether she was good enough to continue into graduate study.

But that does not mean her experience at Peking University consisted only of pressure. Nor does it mean the education she received there had no value.

In 2011, she passed an entrance examination held by École Polytechnique in Beijing and went to France. All her classes there were taught in French, a language she did not initially speak.

Yet she had already studied most of the mathematics covered in the first semester, so she was still able to keep up.

That detail matters.

She did not suddenly acquire mathematical ability after arriving in France. The training she had already received in China gave her the foundation that allowed her to cross the language barrier and continue moving forward.

In France, her grades were perfectly respectable, but she still doubted whether mathematical research was really right for her. For one semester, she tried studying architecture and even interned at an architecture firm in Paris.

Eventually, she discovered that although architecture brought less pressure, it also left her unsure about what she genuinely wanted to pursue. So she returned to mathematics.

Even that return was not quite the dramatic rescue story often told on social media, where one inspiring teacher says exactly the right thing and suddenly “saves” a brilliant student who is about to abandon mathematics.

Wang Hong later recalled that she simply decided to stop repeatedly asking herself, “Am I really good enough?” and instead put her attention into understanding mathematics more deeply.

In 2013, while doing an internship at MIT, she attended a lecture by mathematician Larry Guth. He explained a difficult problem with remarkable clarity, and for the first time she felt that she might actually be able to enter that area of research.

She later began her PhD at MIT and chose Guth as her adviser.

Of course, a good mentor matters enormously.

A teacher who is willing to listen seriously to a student’s still-unformed ideas, who does not rush to dismiss them, and who does not immediately rank students according to competition results or early performance can genuinely change the path of a young researcher.

But reducing everything Wang Hong later achieved to “foreign mentors know how to encourage students” is still far too simple.

A mentor could help her because she already had a deep mathematical foundation, had taken the initiative to change majors, had crossed linguistic and cultural barriers on her own, and had returned to mathematics after repeatedly questioning whether she belonged there.

A Bólè¹ matters. But a thousand-mile horse does not suddenly grow the ability to run on the day it meets one.

Acknowledging the problems in Chinese education does not mean denying the foundation it can provide

People of my generation who grew up in China are very familiar with an educational style built heavily around criticism, comparison, and pressure.

Many parents and teachers rarely tell a child directly:

“You did this really well.”

Instead, they are more likely to point out what is still not good enough. They worry that too much praise will make a child arrogant. They also frequently compare children with others in order to push them to work harder.

Some parents even use humiliation, rejection, or fear to preserve their authority within the family.

Of course, this kind of education can damage a person’s confidence.

A child may already be exceptionally capable and still feel that everything she has achieved is simply luck. She may assume other people are naturally more talented, or feel that the moment she slows down, she will be left behind.

Even after Wang Hong had already produced important work, she continued to doubt herself and sometimes believed she needed to work longer hours than her colleagues simply to reach the same level.

But acknowledging those problems does not mean we have to rush to the opposite extreme and describe Chinese education as a system that does nothing except destroy talent and is incapable of producing capable people.

Chinese education traditionally places strong emphasis on foundations, training, repetition, and long-term effort. Sometimes that emphasis becomes far too heavy, to the point that it squeezes out curiosity and individual differences.

But the knowledge base it creates, the ability to learn, and the habit of enduring intensive training can also remain with a person.

Wang Hong arriving in France without speaking French, yet already knowing much of the mathematics taught in her first semester, is a very direct example.

France gave her a new environment, greater freedom in choosing courses, and space to experiment with architecture. But she could make use of those opportunities partly because she already possessed a foundation strong enough to support further learning.

Without earlier accumulation, later freedom does not automatically turn into creativity.

Freedom does not transform a blank person into a genius.

It gives someone who has already developed abilities the room to search for a direction that fits them better.

A system can produce a great deal of mediocre work without being entirely worthless

I once came across someone asking a question that stayed with me.

He felt that his own academic papers were rather weak, and many of the papers written by people around him did not seem particularly meaningful either. If universities were producing so much ordinary or even low-quality research, he wondered, how had China’s scientific, technological, and engineering capabilities developed so quickly in recent decades?

Someone answered with a rather crude but surprisingly vivid analogy.

When you use a sheet of toilet paper, perhaps only a small area in the middle actually comes into direct contact with your body. According to that logic, most of the paper around it has not been “really used.”

But if you tried to save material by cutting away everything except that tiny central piece, you would probably end up with no protection for your hand at all.

A country’s education and research system is somewhat similar.

What we eventually notice may be only the small number of people who win major international prizes, the scientists who make extraordinary breakthroughs, and the achievements that reach the very top of a field.

But beneath them is a much larger base: primary and secondary schools, university courses, teachers, textbooks, laboratories, libraries, research institutes, discussions among peers, public and private funding, and enormous numbers of ordinary students, engineers, technicians, and researchers.

Not everyone who studies mathematics will become Wang Hong.

Not every academic paper will change the world.

Some research really is poor quality. Some universities suffer from formalism. Some papers are written mainly in order to graduate, earn promotion, or satisfy evaluation requirements.

Those problems deserve criticism. The existence of a few exceptional people does not make them disappear.

But a huge system can contain inefficiency, waste, and flawed evaluation mechanisms while still accumulating genuine technical capacity in certain areas.

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

If a system were completely hollow from top to bottom, it would be difficult to explain how it could continue producing large numbers of engineers, researchers, and skilled technical workers.

It would also be difficult to explain how a country that only a few decades ago still had a population dominated by agricultural work managed, within a relatively short period, to build such a broad industrial, engineering, and scientific base.

The top of a tower cannot float in midair.

We should not romanticize the whole tower simply because we can see its peak.

But neither should we look at all the rough, repetitive, and low-quality parts of the structure and conclude that it has never supported anything at all.

Education abroad is not simply someone telling you “You’re amazing” every day

At the same time, education outside China is often romanticized on the Chinese internet.

It can sound as though parents and teachers abroad spend every day encouraging children, schools have no exams or competition, pressure barely exists, and once a talented person enters such an environment, their potential naturally opens up and life becomes easier from that moment on.

Reality is obviously more complicated.

Good universities abroad are highly competitive too. And mathematical research certainly cannot be completed through encouragement alone.

Wang Hong’s work was the result of years of highly focused effort. The paper in which she and her collaborator proved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture was 127 pages long and was checked repeatedly for months before being made public.

Even after the proof was accepted by other mathematicians, she did not suddenly gain some permanent and unshakable confidence.

A good academic environment is not one where everyone is constantly told that they are the best.

Nor is it a place without criticism, failure, or selection.

What may matter most is that it allows a person to keep learning even when they have not yet proved themselves; that it allows someone to change majors, make mistakes, and change direction; and that immature ideas can still be taken seriously rather than immediately rejected because they do not resemble a standard answer.

The point of encouragement is not to create false confidence.

It is to allow someone who is not yet good enough to avoid immediately concluding:

“I do not deserve to continue.”

And that is not something that has to exist in opposition to the systematic training offered by Chinese education.

A person may need both a solid foundation and psychological space.

Discipline and choice.

High standards and the freedom not to be completely destroyed by failure.

Good education has never existed entirely on one side of that divide.

Why does the internet love turning complicated lives into straight lines?

The reason Wang Hong’s experience was so quickly rewritten as “suppressed at home, saved abroad” is not simply that information became distorted as it spread.

It is also because that version fits conclusions many people already believe.

If someone already believes that everything about China is bad, they will naturally be more willing to believe that Wang Hong experienced nothing but suppression in China and only truly came alive after going abroad.

Someone equally determined to prove that there is nothing wrong with Chinese education may do the opposite. They may emphasize only the foundation she built at Peking University, as though the freedom she later found in France and the United States, the support of her advisers, and international academic collaboration had no importance at all.

These two positions appear to be opposites.

But the way of thinking behind them is remarkably similar.

Both begin with the conclusion and then select the parts of a person’s life that support it.

Both need a clear hero and a clear villain.

And neither is very comfortable admitting that reality may contain several apparently contradictory truths at the same time.

Chinese education can give someone a very strong foundation while also damaging their confidence.

Education abroad can offer more choice and more room for research while still containing competition, pressure, class barriers, and unequal access to resources.

The fact that someone was not the most dazzling student in China does not mean the Chinese stage of their education was meaningless.

And the fact that someone later achieves the highest level abroad does not mean all the credit belongs to the foreign system.

Wang Hong did not suddenly become a mathematician the moment she stepped onto French soil.

Nor did receiving an undergraduate education at Peking University somehow make a Fields Medal inevitable.

Her years in China gave her foundational training and the ability to enter the world of higher mathematics.

France gave her the experience of studying across cultures, trying a different field, and confirming her choice again.

Her mentors and peers at MIT helped her develop as a researcher.

But what connected all of these stages was always her own curiosity, judgment, hard work, resilience, and her ability to keep thinking even through years of self-doubt.

We do not need to diminish one part of a life in order to prove the value of another

When people talk about education, they often seem to believe that we must first decide which system is better before we can explain a person’s success.

But growing up is not a tug-of-war between Chinese and foreign education.

If we acknowledge that Wang Hong benefited from mentors abroad, we do not have to deny the training she received in China.

If we acknowledge that Peking University gave her a strong foundation, we do not have to defend the excessive competition, narrow systems of evaluation, or lack of psychological support that can also exist in Chinese education.

A mature judgment does not mean choosing one of two extremes.

It means looking carefully at what each stage gave a person — and what it may also have taken away.

Perhaps the most interesting question raised by Wang Hong’s experience is not:

“Did Chinese education suppress her, or did education abroad make her successful?”

Perhaps it is this:

Why does a life so long and complicated, shaped by countless people, environments, opportunities, and choices, always have to be cut into a causal story lasting only a few dozen seconds once it reaches the internet?

A person’s success usually contains both early foundations and later opportunities.

There are resources provided by systems, and there are also struggles to escape the limits of those systems.

There are mentors and colleagues who help, and there are also many years of persistence that nobody sees.

We can criticize an education system without denying what it once provided.

And we can admire another environment without turning it into a myth that can somehow create genius out of nothing.

Because real growth is never something that a single form of education simply “produces.”

It is more like a person moving through different worlds, gradually gaining abilities, gradually searching for a place that suits them, and only then reaching the point that the rest of us can finally see.

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Notes

1. Bólè (伯乐) — In Chinese tradition, Bólè was a legendary judge of horses who was said to be able to recognize an exceptional “thousand-mile horse” that others might overlook. Over time, Bólè became a metaphor for a mentor, teacher, or patron who recognizes and nurtures unusual talent. The expression used here contrasts the importance of being recognized with the equally important fact that the talent and ability must already exist before recognition arrives.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 中国教育压制了她，还是国外教育成就了她？这个问题本身就太简单了

German version: Hat das chinesische Bildungssystem sie ausgebremst – oder hat die Ausbildung im Ausland sie erst groß gemacht? Schon die Frage ist zu einfach