This is the kind of death that makes people pretend they’re shocked, but they’re really scared. A 41-year-old guy drops from cardiac arrest while working out, and suddenly every stressed-out person hears a message they didn’t ask for: you can do everything “right” and still get taken out.
Zhang Xuefeng was a controversial education influencer in China with a massive following on Douyin—over 26 million people. That number alone tells you he wasn’t just “popular.” He was part of the education system for a lot of families, whether officials liked it or not. From what’s been shared publicly, he died after going into cardiac arrest while exercising. The response was immediate: grief, shock, and a wave of people talking about what he meant to them.
He built his name on pragmatic advice: how to pick a university, how to pick a major, how to stay employable. In a calmer society, that might sound boring. In China’s pressure-cooker version of school-to-job life, it’s gasoline. Parents and students are not browsing education content for fun. They’re trying to lower the odds of failure in a game that feels rigged and getting tighter, especially with a slowing economy and a job market that makes people nervous.
Here’s my judgment: Zhang didn’t invent the anxiety. He monetized it. And I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it as a description of the role he played. He stepped into the gap between what schools promise and what the job market delivers, and he told people what they suspected was true: certain paths lead to better odds, and some “dream” majors are beautiful traps.
That’s why people loved him. Also why people hated him.
Supporters saw him as the blunt friend who tells you the hard thing before it’s too late. If you’re a student from a regular family with no connections, advice like “pick the major that gets you hired” doesn’t feel cold. It feels like respect. Imagine a kid who studies hard, gets into a decent school, then picks a major because it sounds meaningful—only to realize in their final year that employers don’t care. If Zhang pushed that kid toward a major with clearer job paths, he becomes a hero in that family’s story.
But there’s another side, and it matters. When a single loud voice tells millions of people what’s “worth it,” it can turn into herd behavior fast. Suddenly students aren’t choosing. They’re fleeing. Certain majors get labeled as useless, not because they teach nothing, but because the market doesn’t reward them right now. And “right now” becomes forever in the minds of scared parents. That can shrink a society’s imagination. You don’t just lose poets and researchers. You lose the idea that there’s dignity in anything besides the safe bet.
The part that sits badly with me is how easily “pragmatic” advice can slide into panic management. If your whole brand is employability, you’re always one downturn away from sounding like a doomsday preacher. And if you’re wrong, it’s not a harmless miss. A teenager can’t redo their major like changing a phone case. A family can’t easily get back years of tuition and time. The wins are personal and loud. The losses are private and quiet.
Still, it’s not fair to act like the real villain is an influencer. The real problem is the hunger. People don’t follow someone that intensely unless they feel the official system is not telling them the truth. Zhang’s popularity is basically a public review of the guidance students are getting elsewhere: not enough, too polished, too late, too disconnected from jobs.
And then there’s the way he died. Cardiac arrest while exercising is a brutal detail because it short-circuits the usual comfort stories. If he’d died doing something obviously risky, people could file it away as a lesson. This is harder. It lands on anyone who’s been pushing their body and mind to keep up—students, parents, teachers, office workers, gig workers. Imagine a parent who works all day, scrolls education videos all night, and tells themselves, “Just a few more years, then my kid will be safe.” Now imagine reading about a man, only 41, collapsing mid-workout. That parent doesn’t just feel sad. They feel warned.
Some people will say this is exactly why you shouldn’t build a society around extreme competition, and they’re not wrong. Others will say Zhang helped people navigate reality, and that’s valuable even if the reality is ugly. Both can be true. What I don’t buy is the comfortable middle take that this is “just a tragedy” and nothing else. The mourning is real, but it’s also a mirror: it shows how many people are living with a constant low-grade fear about the future.
If millions of students and parents are outsourcing life choices to one polarizing internet figure, what does that say about the system we’ve decided is “normal”?