As the protege of the most powerful man in the country, his success is guarantee.
Rockets assistant coach Tom Thibodeau, who works closely with Yao, said his prize protege is always willing to do what's right to improve his game.
The sacrifices his parents were making put immense pressure on the youngster, and there are stories of his father flying into a rage if he felt his protege was under performing.
Moreover, I was His Majesty's special protege.
However, rookies Gary Paffett- McLaren tester- and Lewis Hamilton- team protege and GP2 championship leader- are also in the running.
The Hashemite Prince Faisal, a protege of TE Lawrence who had been ousted by the French in Syria, was acclaimed Ring of Iraq in a referendum. The "yes" vote was 96%.
He had a little protege named Toyo who was only twelve years old.
In ten years Boeing has gone from an introspective protege of America's Department of Defence to a global civil aviation giant.
A former groom and then a jockey and quite illiterate, he was a protege of the notorious Christian Weber, one of Hitler's oldest party cronies and himself a horse fancier, who by fraudulence had amassed a fortune and a great racing stable after 1933.
Ominously for him, none of his military Allies who'd once nurtured him as a protege were here either. Eurico Guterres had been deserted.
Fiorentina director general Pantaleo Corvino has told his protege Valeri Bojinov to stay and fight for his place at Juventus.
Timochenko joined the FARC at 13 and was a protege of Mr Marulanda.
Mr Wright has seen his former protege rise to heights he himself could never have dreamed of, and he has been caught up in the tailwinds.
It was the Vaudeville star Marie Dressler who first urged the San Francisco born Marion to "jump into the movies" and the director Lois Weber took Marion under her wing as a protege in 1914.
A protege of Karl Miller, he came to London to write for the London Review of Books and teach at UCL, but quickly gravitated to the TLS, where he worked for 14 years, six of them as deputy editor.
