Zhang Xiaolong's outburst at Renmin University was not a loss of control, but a rejection reaction between Fenbi's old traffic model and the new capital cycle.
The public's astonishment at Zhang Xiaolong stems from a misplaced expectation. People assume that a chief executive who has rung the gong at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and presides over an education empire with a market value in the tens of billions should, upon entering a hallowed academic institution like Renmin University's School of Philosophy, put on the polished veneer of a refined businessman. But this de facto controller of Fenbi instead used the coarsest language and unbridled venting to smash what was meant to be a ceremonial campus lecture into a chaotic mess.
Many mediocrities in the public relations field are quick to dismiss this incident as Zhang Xiaolong's personal loss of temper or a character flaw. Such shallow characterizations completely evade the bloodiest rules of primitive accumulation in China's civil service exam training track. Fenbi's ability to tear a gap in the heavy-asset fortress of established giants like Zhonggong and Huatu did not rely on some profound management theory, but rather on the grass-roots, highly emotional "celebrity instructor IP" suction effect Zhang Xiaolong cultivated in his livestreams. In that era of competing for lower-tier markets and 9.9-yuan lead-generation courses, the more a teacher cursed and attacked competitors, the more they struck a chord with the deep anxiety and rebelliousness of millions of unemployed young people. Zhang's wild persona was once Fenbi's cheapest and sharpest traffic harvesting tool.
But once the wheels of the business cycle roll past the IPO starting line, the traffic engine of the old era becomes a toxic asset in the new cycle.
If you open Tianyancha and trace the commercial trajectory under Zhang Xiaolong's name, you can see this painful schism with striking clarity. The system clearly records the twenty enterprises associated with him, half of which have already been deregistered. The ones still struggling to survive are heavy entities like Beijing Fenbi Tianxia and Fenbi Lantian, which shoulder the core business. This succession of corporate shells, repeatedly registered and dissolved, is essentially the physical trace of Fenbi's attempts to wash away its early rough-and-tumble image and restructure its financial compliance framework while sprinting toward the capital markets. Capital demands that Fenbi become a transparent, risk-controlled modern public company, but the man in the driver's seat is still processing external relations with the operating system of that old fly-by-night outfit.
The deeper friction lies in vested interests: Fenbi is no longer the asset-light team that could coast by selling cheap online courses. To compete with Zhonggong on real revenue scale, Fenbi has in recent years been forced into an extremely heavy expansion of offline learning centers and staffing bloat. At a time when the civil service exam market is fiercely competitive but per-customer willingness to pay is quietly declining, the rent, social insurance, and fulfillment costs of a massive offline team form a terrifying cash-flow high-voltage line. What Zhang Xiaolong faces is a heavy-industrial purgatory where the margin for error grows ever thinner and profits are drained dry by physical locations.
Carrying this extreme internal pressure, when he tried to gain some measure of cultural legitimacy as a capital victor in a place like Renmin University's School of Philosophy—a gathering spot for the high-minded—his bottom-tier grass-roots anxiety collided violently with his profound business exhaustion, ultimately triggering this uncontrollable verbal rejection reaction. The young students seated in that lecture hall likely could not care less how good Fenbi's financials looked; their innate scrutiny of a capitalist, assembly-line test-prep factory precisely pierced the origins Zhang Xiaolong was trying to conceal.
Commerce never settles its accounts through moral judgment. What this public opinion tsunami stripped away was not just Zhang Xiaolong's personal facade, but the irreconcilable weakness of the entire civil service exam training industry after capitalization. A factory that mass-produces test-takers on an assembly line can never incubate a true spiritual icon. When the dense web of affiliated companies on Tianyancha needs real net profits to stay alive, Fenbi can no longer rely on its founder's outrageous remarks to mask declining average order values and the friction of heavy offline assets. Those curses echoing through an academic lecture hall sound more like the final impotent roar of an old warlord from the traffic era, facing down the twin pressures of compliance and cultural disdain.
