Chinese ‘folded boy’ goes home, stands upright after 4 operations to break, reset body
- Chris McMillan
- Aug 30
- 1 min read
South China Morning Post
28th AUGUST 2025
Chinese ‘folded boy’ goes home, stands upright after 4 operations to break, reset body
Doctors describe 21-year-old’s persistence through years of treatment as ‘much greater than that of a normal human being’
China’s so-called folded boy Jiang Yanchen, whose spine had been contorted backwards at an 180-degree angle for most of his life, has finally stood up straight.
Jiang took his first upright steps during a live-stream on August 25.
The 21-year-old underwent four extremely difficult operations over the past two years in which doctors broke and realigned the bones in his lumbar, cervical, hip and chest regions.
Jiang, from a small town in eastern China’s Shandong province, grew up with his neck increasingly bending backwards and his body folding in the shape of the letter “Z”.
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