On Douyin, supporting Israel to eliminate Hamas, my account was besieged by Hamas fans, and my followers dropped from 80,000 to 50,000, with a ban lasting for six months. By the end of 2023, a pile of inscriptions lay in my wallet, still untouched. At the beginning of 2024, a wave of small meme trends quickly faded away.
Time quickly reached June 2024, and while scrolling through videos, I saw vocational student Jiang Ping crushing the competition, winning 12th place in the Alibaba Math Competition. At first, I was amazed that there was such a genius in China, finally discovered.
Then I stopped paying attention to this matter, but a few days later, the overwhelming doubts on Twitter alerted me. Could such a big event also be fabricated?
I originally didn’t believe it!
After browsing Zhihu for half an hour, I was shocked. The flaws in the presentation were numerous; even someone like me, who scored at the bottom of my class in high school math, could see that this was not a genius girl, but someone who hadn't mastered the basics of high school, merely copying without understanding.
At that time, the content on Zhihu alone was enough to restore the truth. Simply put:
Teacher Jiang Ping, Wang Runqiu, used her ID to participate in the competition to accumulate capital for her doctoral studies. He gathered a problem-solving team; when faced with a difficult problem, he submitted answers from both his and Jiang Ping’s accounts. Unexpectedly, Jiang Ping’s account was correct. Alibaba promoted the event, and state media sought traffic, joining forces to hype it up.
At this point, if Wang Runqiu came out to admit his mistakes, it wouldn’t lead to the huge division in society that followed; meanwhile, those in Wang Runqiu's problem-solving group on Zhihu also issued an ultimatum to him, stating that everything would soon be revealed to the public.
But a mysterious force suddenly intervened, stopping everything at the last moment. They decided to resist to the end, deceiving the world.
Various official websites with millions of fans continued to report on Jiang Ping's various interviews, while influential figures like Si Ma Nan, Jin Canrong, Cui Lei, and Du Zijian, with tens of millions of fans, joined forces to attack anyone who questioned Jiang Ping.
I am very poor at math and scored second to last in my class, with 110 points on the college entrance exam. I’m not good at math, but curiously, I’ve always been friends with those who have a talent for it. It’s hard for me to believe that a math genius would treat math as a plan B. After looking at the materials for half an hour, I can 100% judge that Jiang Ping is just a farce. However, the actions of these official media and various so-called influential figures left me speechless. Some materials were spread on Douyin, reaching over 7 million views, and were heavily criticized...
Various university professors, writers, and so-called doctoral candidates from prestigious schools actually referred to Jiang Ping as the contemporary Hui Neng and Lin Wei Yin from the Republic of China (Records of the Grand Historian: Biography of Jiang Ping)... This made me furious.
Zhao Bin questioned Jiang Ping's score falsification and proposed a 5 million gamble, but a group of influential figures and lawyers arranged a charge for him, constituting a gambling offense, and demanded he provide proof of income to see if it involved corruption; 39 contestants jointly petitioned Alibaba, hoping for an investigation into Jiang Ping, while Alibaba's Damo Academy defended Jiang Ping on Twitter, claiming it was just a writing habit.
Is a tragedy of producing over ten thousand per mu about to unfold right before our eyes? People in the Chinese mathematics community fell collectively silent; are they going to let lies run rampant?
The first batch of people to rush up were Zhao Bin and those 39 individuals. I don't know what kind of difficulties they will face in reality after being suppressed by mainstream media and various voices. I only know that in my video comments section, supporters of Jiang Ping claim they want me to pay a painful price; there are also kind-hearted people reminding me that 'the top no longer allows discussion on this matter, be careful of Uncle Hat'; the most ridiculous are those who say, 'The official media supports it, professors from Renmin University have said so, this can't be faked.'
On the morning of June 27, I suddenly came across an article by mathematician Yuan Xinyi on Zhihu. I didn’t know who Yuan Xinyi was at first, so I quickly browsed his background. It seems he is a very respected figure in the mathematics community, and his article used the simplest way and plain language to cover everything from the Alibaba preliminary rules to the blackboard writing in the CCTV video, to the use of LaTeX typesetting software, various small questions, and the analysis of the possibility of cheating. He summarized the doubts on Zhihu, basically addressing everyone’s questions, which anyone who has studied high school math could fully understand.
I looked at his account on Zhihu; it was a new account with not much content, so relatively few people saw it. How can we get more people to look at his content?
I created it in video form, but after uploading, I found the effect was not good. After a few hundred views, the video just wouldn’t gain traction; does this article also have to be buried?
After organizing my mindset a bit, I realized I made two fatal errors while creating the video. In fact, this article didn’t need to be presented in video form; the simplest graphic format would suffice. I just needed to properly crop the images and arrange them to present the original appearance to everyone.
Following this line of thought, I recreated a graphical representation. Sure enough, it gained a lot of recommended traffic and interactions, with comments flooding in. It topped the trending list on Douyin that day, with views frozen at 6.92 million.
Yuan Xinyi's article serves as the final punctuation mark for the Jiang Ping incident. Subsequently, some media that were still supporting Jiang Ping yesterday deleted their various videos, and some shameless media even started to stab Jiang Ping in the back, causing the lies to gradually collapse.
On November 3, 2024, after five months, it was officially announced that the genius girl cheated.
In the end, instead of launching a net attack on Jiang Ping, the focus turned to the person manipulating her behind the scenes, Wang Runqiu, and various official media trying to deceive the entire nation. As well as Si Ma Nan, Jin Canrong, and a certain Shabi, who are deceiving their fans, or perhaps they themselves are just foolish.
Many people have already deleted their videos, leaving a record in the comments section to prove that this crazy mental illness movement once existed.