The mathematics paper came back at 145. The anatomy paper came back at 139. The total was 721 against a stated maximum of 800, and it was good enough for first place nationally in the medical stream. Guo Bin is nineteen. He has been blind since he was six, when he was badly hurt by another person in Shanxi province, and he read every one of those papers with his fingers.
The number that travelled around the Chinese internet was 721. The part almost nobody carried correctly, in Chinese or in English, was which examination it belonged to.
It was not the gaokao. That matters, and not because of pedantry. China runs a second national entrance examination, sat on a different day, on different papers, with its own ranking and its own allocation of university places, and it exists only for candidates with disabilities. Its name in Chinese is dan kao dan zhao, which translates roughly as separate examination, separate admission. Guo Bin sat that one. When the reports say he came first in the country, the country they mean is the field of blind and low vision candidates who sat the medical papers on that route, which is a few hundred people rather than the thirteen million or so who sit the ordinary gaokao.
That sounds, written down, like a deflation. It is the opposite. Once you understand what the second examination is and where it came from, the 721 stops being a feelgood number and starts being a genuinely interesting one.
The route was invented at the exact university Guo Bin has now registered at. In 1987, Changchun University, in Jilin province in China’s northeast, opened a college of special education and became the first institution in the country to admit students with disabilities through a separate examination of its own. Before that, a blind school leaver in China had essentially nowhere to go. The ordinary examination was not available in braille and universities were not obliged to take anyone who could not sit it.
Over the following decade the model spread. Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Tianjin University of Technology, Beijing Union University, Liaoning Normal University and others built their own versions. By the late 2010s there were somewhere in the region of twenty three institutions in China running the separate route.
The catch was always the menu. For most of the route’s life, the majors on offer to blind candidates were a short and predictable list: massage, music, and fine art, with business management added for candidates with physical disabilities. The logic was employment, and in practice it meant that if you were blind and academically strong in China, your reward for being academically strong was a place on a massage course.
The second thing worth knowing is that the separate route is no longer the only one. In 2014, for the first time, blind candidates were able to sit the ordinary gaokao on braille papers. Three years later the education ministry set out twelve specific accommodations that candidates with disabilities are entitled to ask for, braille and large print papers and extra time among them. Two roads now exist, and a candidate picks one.
You can see both of them operating inside a single school. At the Wuhan School for the Blind, where Guo Bin spent twelve years, this year’s leaving cohort split. Five pupils sat the ordinary gaokao. Twelve took the separate route. Sixteen of them ended up with university places. That is the real texture of the thing, and it is a long way from the way the story was told in English, where the exam was simply called the gaokao and the distinction evaporated.
Guo Bin took the separate route and he took the medical stream, which is where the choice gets interesting, because he did not take the obvious thing at the end of it.
He is registered at Changchun University on two degrees at once. Traditional Chinese medicine, which sits broadly inside the historic track and is the respectable, well worn path for a blind student with a good head for study. And computer science and technology, which is not on that path at all. One half of his timetable is the oldest answer China has to the question of what a blind graduate does for a living. The other half is a bet that the answer has changed.
That is not nothing for someone who has been reading by hand since he was seven. His mathematics teacher at the Wuhan school, Zheng Xiaokun, described the method plainly enough: where a sighted pupil takes in a diagram at a glance, Guo Bin would touch the braille over and over and reason the problem through again and again until it held. Braille mathematical notation is its own language, linear where print is spatial, and it is slow. Science came through tactile models, recordings, screen readers, and a lot of repeated explanation out loud.
The school he did all that in is older than most of the city around it. It opened in 1919 as a mission school for blind girls and was renamed the Wuhan School for the Blind in 1952. In more than a century it has put thousands of children through, and since 2009 it has sent more than a hundred and twenty of them on to higher education.
What a residential blind school actually teaches is not what people assume. New pupils there start with a compulsory week of orientation and mobility, and the course begins at the school gate, because the first thing you have to own is the route in. Boarding starts from the fourth year. Dormitory doors are fitted with voice alerts so that a corridor can be read by ear. Alongside the academic timetable there is daily life skills training, cooking, laundry, keeping your own things in order, and eighteen arts clubs running under the name Six Dot Angels, after the six dots of a braille cell. There is also a tuina wing with practice rooms, where pupils on the vocational track put in thousands of hours of hands on work.
The school’s own line about its pupils is that they have simply swapped one way of looking at the world for another, which is a better sentence than most of what has been written about Guo Bin.
He did not arrive there by accident. After he was hurt in 2013, his family had offers from schools in Beijing and in Guangzhou as well. According to the reporting by the Hubei Daily group, which broke and has owned this story throughout, they chose Wuhan because of how two members of staff behaved towards them: a vice principal named Zhou Dejun, and a music teacher named Zhang Long. Guo Bin enrolled in the spring of 2014.
Zhang Long is the second person in this story, and not a supporting one. He is now a vice principal of the school himself. He was Guo Bin’s homeroom teacher for nine of the twelve years and his mentor for all of them, and he came at the boy sideways, through music, on the theory that a six year old who had lost his sight needed something to do with his hands before he needed a curriculum.
It worked to a degree that is slightly absurd. Guo Bin plays the ocarina, the bass, the Native American flute and at least two more wind instruments, depending on which account you read. In 2015 he was one of the founders of VMV, described in the Chinese coverage as the first blind electronic band in Hubei province, in which he played bass. For years he was up at half past four in the morning to get an hour of practice in before school. The band built an online following in the tens of thousands.
The city did its share too. The education authorities waived his fees and his books and paid a monthly living allowance. The school employed his father as campus security and his mother as a residential life teacher, which meant the family moved with him instead of handing him over. His sister went to a local primary school. Charitable foundations covered the rest. None of that makes the arithmetic of a 721 any less his, but it is the honest answer to how a child from a village in Shanxi ends up doing braille calculus in Hubei.
And then, at the end of all of it, the part of the story that is actually about leaving.
On the sixth of September, Guo Bin walked into Changchun University as its four thousand eight hundred and eighty third new student of the intake. He came in his school uniform, with his parents, his sister, the school’s principal Zheng Feng, and Zhang Long. He had admitted beforehand that he was nervous about an unfamiliar place. On the day he said he was excited, and that it was his first time in Changchun.
Changchun is about a thousand miles from Wuhan, in the far northeast, where the winters are serious. It is also, because of that college founded in 1987, one of the few campuses in China with nearly four decades of practice at having blind undergraduates on it. Senior students came out to meet him. There were welcome boards at the gate, and Zhang Long walked him along them one by one.
Then they went to the dormitory, and Zhang Long did the thing that the whole twelve years had been for. He took him round the room starting from the door, a piece at a time, until Guo Bin could get from the doorway to his own bed without help. The next task was the route from the dormitory to the canteen, which the two of them walked until it was learned.
That is what a teacher of blind children does on the last day. Not a speech. A floor plan, transferred by hand, and then a walk to where the food is.
They had one more day. On the seventh they went out to the Changchun World Sculpture Park, and when they reached a cast of Rodin’s The Thinker, Zhang Long solved the problem the way the school had taught him to solve every problem. He stood in the pose himself, let Guo Bin feel the shape of it, the angle of the back, the fist against the jaw, the line of the arm on the knee, and then stepped away and let him copy it. Guo Bin got it. Zhang Long, by the account of the Hubei reporters who were there, kept nodding, which was wasted on his pupil and presumably not on anyone else watching. His line was that not being able to see is all right, that looking at the world with your hands and listening to it with your ears and feeling it with your heart is quite enough.
Then he went home to Wuhan, which is the ending, and the reason this is a story rather than a score.
Guo Bin has been explicit about what he wants the two degrees for. His stated wish, repeated in every interview he has given, is to finish at Changchun and go back to the Wuhan School for the Blind as a teacher. He wants the job that Zhang Long has. He has said he wants to use what happened to him and what he has learned to look after other visually impaired children and give them a future, which is a nineteen year old’s way of saying he would like to be the person at the dormitory door next time.
It is worth sitting with the shape of that for a second, because it is unusual. The conventional version of this story ends at the gate, with the score and the admission letter and a line about overcoming. This one ends with the pupil planning to walk back in the other direction, into the building, to do the slow unglamorous work of teaching a seven year old which way the canteen is.
There is one more thing to say honestly, and it concerns the 721 itself. The examination Guo Bin topped is a smaller, separate, parallel system, and reasonable people in China argue about whether it should still exist in its current form. Keeping it means keeping a route that works, with places reserved and papers designed for the candidates who sit them. Keeping it also means keeping a narrower menu and a ranking that is not directly comparable to anyone else’s. The 2014 opening of the ordinary gaokao to braille papers was celebrated precisely because it offered a way out of that enclosure, and the twelve pupils at Guo Bin’s own school who chose the separate route this year, against five who did not, suggest the question is live.
Guo Bin is now inside both arguments at once. He is a product of the separate system, first in it, and he is studying the subject that the separate system was built to channel blind students into, alongside the subject it never offered them. If the computer science half works, he will be an argument for the menu getting longer. If he goes back to Wuhan and teaches, he will be an argument for the school.
Either way, the number on the paper was 721, the maths was 145, and the last thing anyone taught him before he was left to it was the way to the canteen.