In an article in the FT, journalist Zijing Wu has outlined an elite program funded and run by the Chinese government that focuses on identifying the top brilliant students in the country and training them in cutting-edge STEM-focused research. The ‘Genius Plan’ was launched in China in the 1980s, with an aim to identify and rigorously train mathematically gifted children with the best possible education and preparedness that the country can provide.
When DeepSeek shocked the world with the launch of its cheap, high-performing, large language model, western observers wondered how a small team of Chinese researchers could challenge American AI supremacy.
China's genius class is a big part of the answer https://t.co/161YX5m9lh pic.twitter.com/86yjSbxCjZ
— Financial Times (@FT) February 1, 2026
Wu, who is herself a product of the program, states that the Genius Programs include special university classes, Olympiad camps, and competition training throughout the years to produce future-ready researchers and entrepreneurs in the STEM field. Wu writes that it is because of the Genius Program that China has today an arsenal of top tech talents that are not only developing cutting-edge AI models, but leading in the tech world.
100,000 ‘genius children’ are selected every year under this program, and graduates of these classes include the founder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, the founders of the biggest Chinese e-commerce platforms Taobao and PDD, and the two brothers who started the chipmaker Cambricon. The core engineers behind the LLM DeepSeek, Tencent’s chief scientist, and many, many more top names in the tech industry are all the products of the program.
The Genius Class students are taken out of the regular classes and given specialised training in STEM subjects. They usually do not even need to study the other ‘regular’ non -science’ subjects, and many even bypass the college entrance exam, Gaokao and bag seats in the top universities. Tsinghua University’s Special Pilot Class for Computer Science is a part of the Genius Program, taught by famous computer scientist Andrew Yao.
The author of the article admits that the Genius Program may be stressful at an individual level, like it was for her and she eventually chose a non-science subject for her higher education. But she highlights that the program is the main reason China is currently competing with the USA and even leading in many STEM sectors, like AI, at a scale that is unprecedented int the world.
Dai Wenyuan, a 45-year-old Genius Class graduate and a former global coding champion, who went on to found an AI software company named Fourth Paradigm, says that China currently has over 1000 registered generative AI models, a scale seen nowhere else in the world.
