The fake parenting expert Chinese daughters invented to talk to their parents

At first glance, Old Zhao looked exactly like the kind of man Chinese parents might trust.
His WeChat avatar showed a respectable middle-aged man in a suit. His articles came with serene images of lotus flowers, large fonts, and the solemn cadence of a family advice columnist who had seen it all.
His bio listed an almost comically decorated life: a recipient of the 2008 “Touching China” Special Award, a specialist in parent-child relationships for over 30 years, a tireless helper of families.
The account was called “Old Zhao Explains Reasoning” (老赵讲道理).
But Old Zhao was not a man. He was not middle-aged. He was not a parenting expert.
He was a young woman in her twenties with a phone, an AI tool, and years of failed conversations with her mother.
In January, Xiaoshang (小尚), who lived in Chongqing, created the WeChat account after growing tired of the constant stream of articles her mother sent her: Warnings about being an unmarried woman and living alone, alarmist pieces about takeout food, and the dangers of not following the life path previous generations considered safe. For years, Xiaoshang had tried to respond directly. She explained. She argued. She wrote long messages. She tried to make herself understood.
It did not work.
So she invented a man her mother might believe.
Old Zhao’s articles did not scold young people for being lazy, selfish, unmarried, or insufficiently grateful. They scolded their parents. One headline criticized parents who treated earning a low income or being single as a source of shame. Another warned that emotionally unstable parents could damage their children’s lives. Others told parents not to invade their children’s privacy, not to compare them with others, not to force them home from big cities, and not to treat marriage as the only respectable future.
It was, in Xiaoshang’s words, a way to “fight magic with magic” (用魔法打败魔法) as she explained her online action in an interview with a WeChat-based media outlet.
The magic was instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time in a Chinese family group chat: The moralizing headline, the authoritative male voice, the promise that this piece of advice would restore order to the home. Only this time, the weapon had been turned around.
On the first day, Xiaoshang reportedly published 18 articles. Then she posted about the project on social media, asking other young people what topics they needed Old Zhao to address.
Her phone began lighting up.
People sent her ideas. They suggested fonts, images, layout changes, and topics. They told her “Xiao Zhao” sounded too young and that he needed to become “Old Zhao” to gain authority. They flooded the comment sections under his articles, performing the role of grateful middle-aged readers.
“Teacher Zhao’s words are truly enlightening,” some wrote.
Others claimed to have attended his lectures at famous universities. Some offered flowers and thumbs-up emojis. Some pretended to be parents who had finally seen the light. Together, they helped build the illusion that Old Zhao was exactly what he claimed to be: A wise older man patiently explaining family relationships to other adults.
Within weeks, the account had gained more than 200,000 followers.
The joke worked because almost everyone understood it immediately.
Old Zhao’s advice was strikingly ordinary. Parents should respect their children’s privacy. Stop comparing one child with another. Marriage should not determine a person’s worth. Adult children deserve room to make their own decisions. These ideas had circulated online for years. Many daughters had already repeated them countless times around dinner tables, over the phone, and in long WeChat messages that ended nowhere.
Old Zhao changed the conditions under which those ideas were heard.
He looked like an authority figure many Chinese parents already recognized. Older. Male. Calm. Confident. His articles borrowed the visual language of the advice columns that move endlessly through family WeChat groups: lotus flowers, oversized fonts, reassuring slogans, and the promise that an experienced elder was about to explain how families should work. Readers understood the message immediately because they had seen versions of it before.
The account invited an uncomfortable question. How much influence belongs to an argument, and how much belongs to the person delivering it?
Inside many Chinese families, credibility often follows hierarchy. Parents speak to children. Older generations advise younger ones. Experts settle disagreements. Personal experience does not always carry the same authority, especially when it comes from a daughter explaining choices her parents dislike.
Old Zhao entered that hierarchy without challenging its rules. He simply occupied a position that many young women felt they could never claim for themselves.
Anyone familiar with Chinese family group chats recognizes the ecosystem that made the joke possible. Anonymous articles appear every day with confident headlines about marriage, parenting, health, or success. Their authors are often impossible to identify. Their credentials remain vague. Still, they travel from phone to phone with remarkable authority, gathering trust simply because they resemble the kind of advice people have learned to respect.
Old Zhao copied that format almost perfectly. The account felt believable long before readers discovered who had created it.
Its popularity soon carried it beyond satire. Parents arrived alongside their children. Some wrote asking for advice. One grandmother wanted help rebuilding a relationship with her granddaughter. Another mother complained that the account encouraged children to question parental authority after her daughter shared one of Old Zhao’s articles in the family chat.
Xiaoshang suddenly found herself answering questions she had never expected to receive. She worried about accuracy. She worried about writing responsibly. She worried about how quickly an internet joke had become a place where strangers brought years of private conflict.
That transformation revealed something larger than the account itself.
Conversations about China’s changing family relationships often center on economics: declining marriage rates, expensive housing, youth unemployment, and the rising cost of raising children. Old Zhao points toward another source of tension that receives far less attention. Many young adults already have the language to explain the lives they want. They can explain why they prefer to marry later, live independently, seek therapy, or build careers far from home. The challenge comes after those explanations leave their mouths.
Xiaoshang experienced that herself. She reportedly sent one of Old Zhao’s articles to her own mother, hoping the message might land differently. Her mother dismissed it as “messy things” that were not worth reading. The article failed to change her mind, just as years of earlier conversations had. Yet hundreds of thousands of readers immediately recognized the experience. They recognized the exhaustion of explaining the same choices over and over again, the ease with which concern could become control, and the feeling that adulthood was measured by obedience rather than independence.
Old Zhao never resolved those conflicts. His popularity came from making them visible. For many readers, the account offered a fleeting thought experiment: What if their words were delivered by someone their parents were already prepared to trust? That question, more than any individual article, explains why the account resonated so widely. The advice itself was familiar. What felt unfamiliar was hearing it carried by a voice that families instinctively treated as authoritative.