Zhang Xue's Hard Work, and the Iceberg You Can't See

I saw an article on a public account about someone named Zhang Xue going viral. The gist was: this person's success has zero excuses — family background, industry, origins, teachers, every environmental variable was terrible, and yet he still made it. Sounds extremely attractive. It really does read like a motivational story. But as a committed Marxist, I think it's all bullshit.

Let me give an example. Suppose we run a comparison experiment — me versus this person. Maybe I need to put in x times the effort to succeed, and this person puts in 100x. So I ask: by what logic? By what logic should this person have to put in so much more effort than me just to reach the same result?

A lot of these motivational pieces emphasize the outcome while downplaying the process, or treating the process as entirely subordinate to the result. But the process is what matters most. For instance, when we advocate for gender equality, we're not saying "both men and women can become CEOs" — obviously they can. We're saying "men and women, putting in the same effort, should be able to become CEOs." The main manifestation of gender inequality in modern society isn't that men can do certain things and women can't. It's that women often have to put in far more effort, or sacrifice far more, to achieve the same result. That's where the unfairness lies.

Coming back to this narrative that treats individual effort as the sole cause of success — there's another critical problem. This person's success can only represent one out of thousands who tried just as hard. Say only 1,000 people in all of China reached the same level of effort as this person. Then you've got a 1-in-1,000 chance of pulling off what they did. That number is obviously deeply fucked up.

And going further — even though this person "made it," their actual standard of living isn't that much better than ordinary people's. If a society requires someone from a humble background to put in that kind of effort just to live a decent middle-class life, then something is seriously wrong with that society.

This narrative has an even bigger problem: it strips working people of their right to explain. If a worker says, "I lost my job because cheap labor took it," elites can say, "Look, Zhang Xue didn't lose his job." If a student says, "I couldn't get into a good university because educational resources were scarce," elites can say, "Look, Zhang Xue dropped out and still lives better than you." This is essentially a form of ideological defense by the elite class — converting all real suffering into excuses, demanding that the working class possess inhuman willpower.

Finally, within Marx's framework, there's one more point: when production relations constrain productive forces, no amount of effort matters. The most classic example is Xiangzi (and don't tell me you didn't read it seriously — lying flat is obviously no good either).