Two Chinese nationals won the Fields Medal on July 23, prompting Chinese state media, university officials and senior academics to portray the awards as a national achievement and evidence that China could become a leader in world mathematics.
Hong Wang and Yu Deng had both studied at Peking University. But the advanced training, collaborations and research careers behind the work recognized by the award developed principally in the United States and Europe. The Simons Foundation’s announcement identified Deng with the University of Chicago and Wang with New York University and France’s Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies.
Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute, said in a podcast that Chinese propaganda had claimed the awards as products of the country’s education system despite the decisive role played by the scholars’ overseas research environments.
Their achievements were not products of the education system under the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Yu said, but were attained “in spite of it.”
The dispute soon moved beyond celebratory rhetoric. Peking University deleted an interview with Deng and republished a revised version that removed his recommendation that young researchers gain substantial experience abroad.
In the original interview archived by China Digital Times, Deng said scholars should, when conditions permitted, spend enough time overseas to experience another academic system, meet researchers, and establish collaborations—not merely make a short visit. Whether they later remained overseas or returned to China should depend on their research, lives, and long-term plans, he said.
The deleted answer touched on larger questions surrounding the awards: Who could claim the two scholars’ development—and who would control the cultivation of those expected to follow them?
Peking University’s mathematics school states its answer plainly: “the Party manages talent.”
Claiming a National Triumph
Zhang Jiping—a former dean of Peking University’s School of Mathematical Sciences and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences—said the two awards could strengthen China’s “national scientific confidence.”
“This is a major historic breakthrough for Chinese mathematics,” Zhang told the state-run Science and Technology Daily, adding that China possessed top talent and results and that “Chinese mathematics can lead the world.”
Yet Peking University’s own account traced the research careers that followed largely through institutions abroad.
Deng studied at Peking University from 2007 to 2009 before transferring to MIT. He earned his doctorate at Princeton University, completed postdoctoral work at New York University and later taught at the University of Southern California before joining the University of Chicago.
Wang entered Peking University’s School of Earth and Space Sciences in 2007 and transferred into mathematics the following year. She later studied in France, earned her doctorate at MIT, completed postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study, and taught at UCLA before joining New York University and the French institute.
Zhang himself said the scholars’ central advances were completed overseas and that China had not yet built a complete domestic chain capable of cultivating mathematicians at that level. He also said contemporary mathematics required continued international exchange and access to foreign scholars.
Interview Question and Answer Removed
The original interview contained 24 numbered questions. One asked whether young scholars should study abroad, when they should leave, and whether they should eventually return to China.
Deng rejected a single prescribed answer. He discussed geopolitical obstacles to studying in the United States and the development of mathematics inside China before recommending substantial overseas experience when possible.
Peking University deleted the original and published a new version without the question or Deng’s answer. The replacement also removed the Q1-to-Q24 numbering system that would have made the missing exchange immediately visible. Reports comparing the versions found other changes as well.
The effort to establish Peking University’s role in Wang’s career produced a parallel dispute.
Qingshi Lin, a pro-Beijing blogger on the Chinese question-and-answer platform Zhihu, posted a photograph of a private 2010 email as evidence that Peking University mathematics professor Wang Lizhong had supported Wang’s application to study in France. The image left Wang’s personal email address visible. The identity of the person who originally obtained or leaked the correspondence was not established.
The recommendation controversy concerned whether Peking University faculty had supported Wang’s departure for overseas study—not where the research environment that later shaped her work was located. Peking University’s former mathematics dean Chen Dayue also told the state-run Guangming Daily that Wang had received recommendations from mathematics professors Wang Fuzheng, Tian Qingchun, and Wang Lizhong.
The deleted Deng interview raised the more consequential question of whether the institution could publicly acknowledge why such departures continued to matter.
That sensitivity was not confined to public relations. The school’s own records describe a system in which the CCP directs how talent is identified, evaluated and developed.
‘The Party Manages Talent’
Peking University’s School of Mathematical Sciences says its party committee adheres to the principle that “the Party manages talent.” Its July party-committee report said the school had 388 CCP members organized in 17 party branches and credited the committee with recruiting prominent mathematicians, developing high-level personnel and advancing the school’s academic standing.
The school’s latest available annual report said the party committee was “deeply involved” in assessments of teacher conduct and political thought throughout recruitment, hiring, professional development, promotion, talent-program applications, performance reviews, and postdoctoral completion.
The same report said the school sought to turn the CCP Central Committee’s directives into the “fundamental driving force” behind its development and pledged to improve the cultivation of top talent to better meet national strategic needs. The school’s party leadership has called for “party building” to be closely integrated with the discipline’s core work, directing faculty branches to combine party activities with research projects and talent cultivation.
Political formation extended across undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs. The annual report said all 55 party branches, Communist Youth League branches and class units participated in more than 230 activities during the year.
In June 2024, more than 200 CCP members from the mathematics school, the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research and a national big-data laboratory attended a party-discipline education program. The school said the program was intended to turn political study into “political consciousness and conscious action” and align participants’ thinking and actions with decisions of the CCP Central Committee, according to the annual report.
That direction begins long before scholars apply for university positions.
A 2021 CCP Central Committee directive ordered stronger political initiation and values formation through the Young Pioneers, the CCP-led organization for primary- and middle-school children. It said children should be prepared to struggle for the communist cause and placed party committees in charge of the organization.
The same year, China’s National Textbook Committee ordered Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s political ideas, called Xi Jinping Thought, incorporated into curricula and teaching materials across successive levels of education. The Ministry of Education directive applied to basic, vocational and higher education. Political formation begins in childhood, selection intensifies through assignments, examinations and ranking, and party supervision continues into hiring, promotion, research, and talent management.
Hongqi Li, a biology professor at Frostburg State University in Maryland who has taught in the United States since 2000 and advised students educated in both countries, told The Epoch Times that academic competition in China begins in kindergarten and becomes more consequential at every stage.
Li recalled meeting an 11-year-old visitor from Shandong, China, who said she had been assigned 140 essays for one summer break, each at least 500 Chinese characters—not including assignments in her other subjects.
Li told her that U.S. elementary schools generally dismiss between 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., leaving students time for music, sports, clubs and other activities.
“No wonder there are so many geniuses in America,” the student replied, according to Li.
In addition to teaching, Li said he has mentored nearly 30 Chinese high school students at a private school in Maryland. Most had been regarded as average students in China, and some had ranked near the bottom of their classes.
After receiving encouragement from teachers in the United States, Li said, they regained confidence and improved academically. All were admitted to good universities by graduation.
The selection Li described does not end when students enter college. At the university level in China, examination rankings give way to publication counts, journal prestige, talent labels and political review.
Zhang, while declaring that Chinese mathematics could lead the world, said the domestic research system remained distorted by “title worship,” “paper worship” and the entrenched practice of judging scholars and their work according to the journals in which they published.
Some Chinese mathematicians have also warned that intensive training for academic Olympiads is not the same as cultivating original researchers.
According to Sina Education, China began competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1986 and guaranteed exam-free university admission to the roughly two dozen students selected for the national training team each year. The policy grew from 1980s rules granting the same privilege to top performers in five academic competitions, including mathematics, chemistry, and computer science. That ignited a nationwide boom in Olympiad training.
Ma Zhiming, a former president of the Chinese Mathematical Society, once criticized China’s Olympiad rush as overly utilitarian and mechanized, saying it taught students techniques for answering questions while potentially extinguishing innovative thought, according to the Communist Youth League-run China Youth Daily.
Olympiad contestants solve extraordinarily difficult questions selected by others and known to have answers. Frontier research requires scholars to identify unanswered questions, invent methods and continue working without knowing whether years of effort will succeed.
Wang experienced that difference personally.
Rote Learning Versus Independent Thinking
Wang entered Peking University’s mathematics program surrounded by classmates with elite Olympiad records.
Tian Gang, a Peking University professor and academician who taught her, later said Wang “was not an Olympiad student” and had not been among the most conspicuous performers in her class.
After word emerged that Wang was set to receive the Fields Medal, Tang Nianhua, her high school homeroom teacher at Guilin High School, told state media Guangxi Daily that Wang had never been a rote-trained test taker. Her strong independent streak, Tang said, had instead drawn criticism and ridicule from classmates.
Wang told China Science Daily, a Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliated media, that she had felt nearly invisible among classmates with mathematics Olympiad gold medals at Peking University. They could often solve difficult questions quickly, while she spent long periods developing her own understanding—even when she became stuck or failed to reach the answer.
She began to doubt whether she belonged in mathematics.
“A mathematician should at least be able to solve the problem,” she recalled thinking.
After studying in France, Wang entered MIT and began working with Larry Guth. She said Guth would wait patiently when she could not answer a question at the board. When she brought him an incomplete, confused or possibly wrong idea, he did not interrupt or dismiss it.
Instead, Guth encouraged her to explain everything she was thinking and continue developing the idea until she could discover for herself where it worked and where it failed.
“That kind of dialogue taught me how to sort out the ideas in my head and how to go deeper,” Wang said. Finding out through her own work that an idea was unreliable gave her more experience than simply being told it was wrong, she said.
Wen Chen, a staff scientist in Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, told The Epoch Times that distinction matters because Wang’s development did not follow the path China’s competition- and exam-driven system is best equipped to reproduce. Chen described it instead as the growth of an independently minded student who found environments suited to her way of thinking and conducting research.
Frank Xie, a professor at the University of South Carolina Aiken, told The Epoch Times that Chinese universities depend on overseas training, international publication, foreign collaboration, and global academic recognition.
At the same time, he said, CCP political demands increasingly emphasize ideological security, domestic cultivation and distance from Western influence. Administrators therefore face incentives to remove language that may appear politically unsafe even when it is academically defensible, he said.
Xie said Chinese universities remain caught between the international openness required for leading research and a party-controlled system that demands ideological conformity and political safety.
Peking University’s own records say the Party manages talent, participates in personnel evaluation, and integrates party work with research and education. In that structure, Xie said, administrators are rewarded for avoiding political risk—not for protecting fundamental academic truths and values.
