Zhang Jiaqi's Mother Cannot Legally Keep Her Prize Money, Lawyers Say
After the retired Olympic diving champion revealed her mother holds her three bank cards and refuses to hand them back, Chinese lawyers have pointed to the Civil Code: a minor athlete's prize money is her own property, and guardianship ends at eighteen.
The family dispute that has trailed the Olympic diving champion Zhang Jiaqi since she retired has now acquired a legal dimension. Zhang revealed on a television programme that her three bank cards — holding the prize money from a career that began in childhood — are all in her mother's hands, and that when she asked to recover some of the money to learn investing after retiring, her mother refused with a single phrase: "You wouldn't understand." This week, lawyers consulted by Chinese media gave the argument a frame that turned celebrity gossip into a question of law: what Zhang's mother is doing, they say, has no legal basis.
Under Article 35 of China's Civil Code, as legal commentators summarised it in Haibao News' widely shared post, prize money earned by a minor athlete belongs to the child, not the household. Parents may hold and manage it as guardians, but they have no right to spend it on themselves or fold it into family expenses. Once their child turns eighteen, guardianship ends, and the young adult can simply ask for the money back. An online tally puts Zhang's career earnings at roughly 1.5 to 2 million yuan — not a fortune by the standards of China's biggest sports stars, but a substantial sum for a diver who spent her teenage years winning national and Olympic titles.
The story has run for days on Weibo because it sits on a nerve: the assumption that whatever a child earns belongs to the family. Comments have split accordingly. "How is using your own child's money illegal? Honestly I still don't get why everyone is piling on her parents," one post asked, reflecting a segment of readers who see the criticism of Zhang's mother as an intrusion into a private family matter. Others read the case as a pattern made visible — an athlete who spent her minority earning money she never controlled.
Zhang's own record complicates any simple sympathy. When she retired in November 2025, she started livestream selling eight days later and was accused of being "ungrateful" and "grabbing money" — criticism she answered in January by saying she accepted it, "but I also need to live." The necklace episode that first put her family under scrutiny — the gold necklace her mother bought her that never made it around her neck — now reads, in hindsight, as an early signal of the same pattern the bank cards confirmed.
What happens next is an open question. No lawsuit has been reported, and the lawyers' reading stops at the law: it establishes that Zhang is entitled to ask, not that asking her mother will be easy. For the moment the case has done something quieter — put into general circulation the idea that a child's earnings are the child's, a proposition that is settled in statute and, as the argument on Weibo shows, still contested at the dinner table.