A Vocational-School Graduate Just Won China's Biggest Stand-Up Competition
Xiaoqi, who entered vocational school at 13 and worked as a hairdressing apprentice, carpenter and photo retoucher before taking up comedy, won the third season of "Stand-Up and Ta's Friends" — and thanked the audience for electing China's first vocational-school champion.
When the votes were counted on the finale of "Stand-Up and Ta's Friends" (脱口秀和Ta的朋友们) — the Tencent Video competition that has become China's biggest stand-up stage — the winner was not a veteran writer or a variety-show regular but Xiaoqi, real name Liang Zhiming. He spent the first sentence of his acceptance speech naming what made the moment unusual: "Thank you for voting in the first vocational-school champion" (感谢大家投出第一个中专生冠军).
Xiaoqi, from Fuxin in the northeastern province of Liaoning, entered a vocational secondary school at thirteen — the zhongzhuan (中专) track that routes students toward job training rather than the academic high schools that lead to university. Before comedy he worked as a hairdressing apprentice, a carpenter and a photo-studio retoucher, and he has now spent five years doing stand-up, most of it in the small club scene of Changsha.
His line landed because the vocational track is where a large share of Chinese teenagers quietly end up. Under the senior-high entrance exam split, close to half of each cohort is directed into vocational schooling — a policy meant to supply skilled workers, but read by many parents as a verdict on their child before adulthood has begun. "First vocational-school champion" trended because it named a group that China's success stories rarely come from.
"Apart from stand-up, I don't think I have ever really won at anything," he told the audience. Fan accounts called the season "a super beautiful summer," and the win traveled past the fan clubs: it climbed to No. 17 on Baidu's hot search board, with the discussion less about the trophy than about the route that brought him there.
His winning sets run on what viewers have labelled "neurotic-stream" (神经流) comedy — a fast, wired, self-deprecating register built from the vocational-school years, paired with densely worked scripts that fellow contestants helped him polish. In his final set he returned to an image he had used a year earlier: "Last year I wanted to be a firework. I hoped that when I bloomed in the dark night, everyone could see me. This year I realized fireworks need a lot of people to push them."
The name card the show flashed when he walked out carried the whole résumé: his name, the signboard of Changsha's Xiaoka Comedy club, and the line "five years of stand-up."