Chinese debutant Zhang Boheng beat Olympic champion Hashimoto Daiki by 0.017 points to win the men's all-around title at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in the Japanese city of Fukuoka on Friday.

Zhang, 21, competing in his first major international event, scored highest in the floor, vault and parallel bars and second-best in the horizontal bar and rings, collecting a total of 87.981 points. Hashimoto, who edged Zhang's teammate Xiao Ruoteng to second place at the Olympic Games, took the silver with 87.964 points.

"I am too excited to sleep tonight," said Zhang, who narrowly missed out on the Tokyo Olympics. "To beat Olympic champion Hashimoto and win the gold medal is a great achievement."

Zhang's title hope hung by a thread after he fell off the pommel horse at the Kitakyushu General Gymnasium, but after Hashimoto also slipped off the apparatus, the two gymnasts, who finished 1-2 in qualifying, returned to the starting point.

Zhang, who won the silver medal at the Chinese National Games in September, managed to build an advantage of 0.35 points after the fifth discipline of parallel bars before going to the final showdown in the horizontal bar, an event Hashimoto won at the Tokyo Olympic Games.

His landing was a little awkward, but the nearly perfect routine on the bar earned 14.800 points to give him a lead of 15.15 points over Hashimoto.

Hashimoto, 20, showed that it was his event, but his score of 15.133 was not enough.

"I think that as the Olympic champion, Hashimoto was under much more pressure than I am," said Zhang. 

"There must be a reason why I failed to win the gold medal," Hashimoto said. "That shows that I am not strong enough."

Ukraine's Illia Kovtun took the bronze with 84.899 points. Zhang's teammate Shi Cong finished sixth.