Zhang Yiming’s General Biology

History has a way of being ironic. If Zhang Yiming had gotten into the biology department back then, ByteDance almost certainly wouldn’t exist today — and neither would TikTok.

I once came across Zhang Yiming mentioning how much General Biology had influenced him, and assumed he’d stumbled upon it by chance. Turns out that wasn’t the case at all.

He enrolled at Nankai University in 2001. He had originally applied to the biology program but wasn’t admitted, and was instead assigned to microelectronics upon entry, before later transferring to software engineering on his own initiative.

This tells you something — biology was a highly competitive major back in 2001, at least harder to get into than microelectronics.

This isn’t hearsay. It comes directly from Zhang Yiming himself, in a conversation with Qian Yingyi:

Why did I apply to the biology department? At the time, everyone was saying biology would be the leading field of the 21st century, so it was extremely popular. I was personally interested too — in high school I competed in biology olympiads and read a book called General Biology written by a Peking University professor. It had a big impact on me.

“The 21st century is the century of biology” — that line must have led countless students astray. Zhang Yiming nearly fell for it too. But he got lucky, in a roundabout sort of way.

The General Biology Zhang Yiming mentioned is this one:

General Biology, edited by Chen Yuezeng, first edition 1997.

General Biology, edited by Chen Yuezeng, first edition 1997.

It’s safe to say Zhang Yiming read the first edition. General Biology — An Introduction to Life Science, edited by Chen Yuezeng, was published in July 1997.

The reason I’m bringing up this book is that I happen to have owned the first edition — from 1997.

I enrolled in 1997, and this book showed up tucked in with the textbooks the school handed out. It was priced fairly high for something that wasn’t even a required textbook, and nobody explained why it was included.

Looking back, there was probably some murky favor-trading involved, or what you might call a “quota purchase.” Or maybe whoever was in charge of textbook procurement had taken a kickback.

The book’s overall structure leans somewhat toward popular science writing — nothing particularly impressive. But it doesn’t read as drily as a standard textbook, so flipping through it occasionally wasn’t a waste of time.

Since Chen Yuezeng was only the editor, with a large number of contributors, one can imagine there must have been some kind of reference source the book was modeled on. In that era, Chinese professors compiling textbooks were more or less copying from English-language works. The same was true of several introductory Chinese computer science books, which were essentially repackaged versions of classic English textbooks. A certain professor’s C Language Programming, for instance, was little more than a retelling of K&R’s The C Programming Language. And the BASIC textbooks that dominated — and arguably corrupted — education for years followed the same pattern.

After Professor Chen passed away, General Biology continued to be revised and republished in new editions. I can’t speak to their contents, but judging by the covers, each one looks worse than the last.

Maybe textbook writing in the field has improved by now?

That Zhang Yiming became who he is today is of course a matter of personal choice and hard work — but environment played a role too. Not getting into biology and being redirected to microelectronics was something that would have been nearly unthinkable just a few years earlier. And then being able to switch majors smoothly once inside the university — that too was a stroke of luck. It shows that Nankai is, after all, Nankai. A good university naturally has a certain magnanimity about it.