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”.