Olympic Champion Zhang Jiaqi's Chat Records With Her Mother Fuel a Parenting Debate
Screenshots of Olympic diving champion Zhang Jiaqi's WeChat exchanges with her mother — lectures, forwarded cautionary videos and criticisms — have become the most-discussed parenting text of the week, reviving the debate over China's tradition of upbringing by criticism.
The text messages were unremarkable one by one, and crushing in bulk. Over the weekend, screenshots of the WeChat exchanges between Olympic diving champion Zhang Jiaqi and her mother spread across Weibo under a hashtag that translates as "suffocating to read Zhang Jiaqi's chat records with her mom." The record shows what Chinese readers instantly recognized as one genre of motherhood: forwarded short videos on the dangers of cold drinks, lectures on self-discipline, and corrections of a daughter's habits, stacked on top of one another with little small talk in between. "It's basically all preaching," wrote the user whose post set off the trend. "Genuinely makes me want to collapse." (The post that started it)
Zhang, who won synchronized platform gold at the Tokyo Olympics as a teenager, is now starring in the reality show My Girl 2026, a long-running format in which the domestic lives of young celebrities are filmed and their mothers observe and comment from a studio panel. The chat records surfaced as the show aired, and viewers had already been keeping score of the mother-daughter dynamic on screen. In one widely discussed episode stretch, the mother criticized Zhang for keeping a cat, for drinking iced beverages, for snacking, for leaving clothing tags uncut. The show's observation panel pushed back on air: "Let her eat — her first twenty years were healthier than anything we ate," one member said, a line that itself trended. (A roundup of the show moments)
What turned celebrity material into a national conversation is how precisely the exchanges matched a phrase Chinese internet culture has ready for it: baya-style education — upbringing by criticism, in which praise is withheld on the theory that it spoils. Commenters dissected the pattern line by line: "Every single thing she does gets two remarks and two put-downs. Her mother's mouth opens only for her daughter's flaws." (One such reading) Others went further, importing therapy-speak that barely existed in Chinese family talk a few years ago — several top comments debated whether the mother's behavior resembled narcissistic traits, a diagnosis-by-commentary that would have been unthinkable vocabulary on a parenting topic a decade ago.
The argument is not entirely one-sided. Some readers defended the mother in the terms Chinese parents usually reach for: vigilance is how love is performed, the ice-water warnings come from years of worrying about a child who grew up in cold pools, and a champion's discipline was built by exactly this voice. Others replied that the girl at the center of it is an adult now, an Olympic champion, and still cannot get a plain compliment. "When her life loses direction, her mother has no advice to give," one viewer wrote. "But on the small things, the criticism never stops." (That reading)
The show's own poster carries the slogan "No need to be perfect, just be comfortable." The chat records its star's family produced this week are being read, in much of China, as the document of the opposite upbringing.