Someone who moves slowly but continues moving for 20 years can travel an extraordinary distance.
By the time he completed his doctorate, the old labels no longer described the full person.
“Poor village boy.”
“Coal miner.”
“Vocational student.”
“Factory worker.”
“Construction laborer.”
Each description had been true at one point.
None of them was complete.
Even “PhD” captures only the final academic stage rather than the whole journey.
The real story lies in the movement between those identities.
Returning to the Underground World as an Expert
There is a striking symmetry to his life.
As a child, he entered the underground world close to the bottom of its labor hierarchy, helping his father because his family needed income.
Years later, he returned to underground engineering equipped with advanced knowledge of geology, mining, machinery and tunnel construction.
He had moved from laboring inside an engineered environment to studying how such environments function and how engineering problems within them can be solved.
That transformation does not erase the years of hardship.
It places them in a different context.
The mine had once represented necessity.
Later, underground engineering became part of his professional expertise.
The boy who had entered the mines because he had few choices eventually acquired the education to decide how he would engage with that same world.
Perhaps that is the most powerful dimension of his journey.
Education did not simply carry him away from his past.
It allowed him to reinterpret it.
In June 2025, when he completed his doctorate at Beijing University of Technology, the degree represented far more than an academic qualification.
It represented the accumulated result of years spent working, studying, failing, retrying, learning and accepting help.
He had once gone underground at the age of 12 because his family needed him to work.
More than two decades later, he left university as a doctor of engineering.
The distance between those two moments cannot be measured only in years.
It can be measured in examinations taken twice, jobs accepted out of necessity, textbooks studied after work, mentors encountered, applications repeated, field research completed and opportunities slowly created.
His story does not promise that persistence makes every obstacle disappear.
It offers something more grounded.
A difficult beginning can shape a person's life without completely defining its ending.
And sometimes, the world a person once struggled simply to survive can eventually become the very field in which he develops expertise.
Sources and Further Reading
China Daily — July 23, 2025: Former coal miner digs deep to earn a doctorate in engineering. The report includes university confirmation of his doctoral enrollment, details from his dissertation acknowledgments, his childhood mining experience, employment history and comments about perseverance.
Beijing University of Technology / Xinhua and Chinese Youth Daily reporting — July 2025: The university confirmed that the graduate studied full time at its College of Architecture and Civil Engineering from September 2020 to June 2025 and documented his progression from vocational college to geological engineering, mining engineering and doctoral study.
South China Morning Post — July 23, 2025: Chinese man who worked aged 12 in mine with father goes on to earn engineering PhD. The report documents his childhood mining experience, his online nickname “Coal Miner No. 3,” and his later academic progress.
Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China / Xinhua — May 2025: Official figures reported that 13.35 million candidates registered for China's 2025 national college entrance examination, providing context for the scale of the gaokao.