Han’s story broke on June 26 on Henan Provincial TV Station television program “Xiaoli Helps”, and a People’s Daily video report the next morning made her a national talking point.
Her score sat among the highest in Henan, the most competitive province in China’s National College Entrance Examination, known as gaokao, though she was not its top scorer, and provinces now mask the exact rankings of their leading candidates. A teacher at her school in Jia county, Pingdingshan, told Jimu News she had long placed among its very best students.
Tsinghua University and Peking University, China’s two leading institutions, both contacted her after the results, each offering full scholarships and living support.
Her mother, Shao Hongzhen, has had ankylosing spondylitis, a spinal arthritis, for more than a decade and is largely bedridden, unable to dress or walk unaided.
Her father farms and takes construction work to support the family and put two daughters through school, the other one in junior high. Neither parent studied past junior high.
Han never took a tutoring or cram class, rare among Chinese students, and taught herself by borrowing classmates’ practice papers and filling notebooks with the problems she missed.
She had no smartphone. Her father gave her 10 to 20 yuan (US$1.50 – 3) a week at boarding school, and she handed most of it back on visits home to save for her mother’s medicine.
Asked in the interview what she would tell classmates glued to their phones, she said, “If you don’t suffer for study, you’ll suffer in life.”
Students enter a school on the first day of China’s National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) known as “gaokao”, in Beijing on June 7, 2026. Photo by AFP |
Rejecting livestreamers’ funding offers
Han’s interview drew a wave of abuse, with one retort that a high score did not entitle her to lecture anyone, drawing more than 500,000 likes before comment sections were shut.
Xinhua Daily Telegraph documented streamers camped at her door, and commentaries in Workers’ Daily and Cover News defended her, arguing hard-won advice should not be read as arrogance.
Southern Metropolis Daily reported that self-media crews packed the lane outside her home for about a week, livestreaming through the courtyard gate, following her when she went out, and pressing the family for endorsements.
Han thanked would-be donors but said her costs were already covered by her school and the county government and that she would work part-time for the rest.
On July 1 she chose Tsinghua’s eight-year physician-scientist program, a combined bachelor’s-to-doctorate track, over Peking University’s medical school, saying she wanted to research conditions like her mother’s. Tsinghua pledged to cover her tuition and living costs for all eight years.
After “Xiaoli Helps” connected the family with a Zhengzhou orthopedic hospital, its deputy director offered to treat her mother at no cost, and a spine surgeon at a Peking University hospital also stepped forward.
On July 2 the family said, through Dax Newsthat they were grateful but would accept no more visits or interviews, wanting only to fill out her application and return to ordinary life.
Award certificates Han has collected since primary school cover the walls of the family’s bare house.
“Knowledge changes fate,” she said in the interview, vowing to lift her parents to a better life through her studies.
Some 12.9 million people registered for this year’s gaokao, according to China’s Ministry of Education, down from 13.35 million in 2025. It remains the world’s largest exam by number of candidates, more than three times the combined size of India’s two biggest university entrance tests.
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