December 2025 may be remembered as a remarkable month. Within just a few weeks, three separate internet phenomena of extraordinary scale erupted across China’s online space. Any one of them would have been the defining viral event of an entire year. That all three were compressed into a single month is striking.
The Youth Film Commentary Craze
The first emerged around December 8, when censors deleted a video commentary on the film Fang Hua (Youth). The commentary’s central theme was nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution. Within days, it had surpassed ten million views on Bilibili — an exceptionally rare number even by Chinese internet standards — with concurrent viewership sustained at the extreme level of fifty to sixty thousand. It was taken down at peak virality.
Fang Hua is a 2017 film by director Feng Xiaogang, adapted from a novel by Yan Geling, a prominent Chinese writer based in Germany. It tells the absurd story of a group of young performers in a military arts troupe during the final years of the Cultural Revolution, and the film itself is unambiguously a critique of the era’s madness.
What went viral, however, was not the film but a multi-hour “film commentary” video — a content format distinctive to the Chinese internet. Creators working in this genre do not review films in the conventional sense. Instead, they dissect imagery frame by frame, decoding political symbolism and reading it as allegory for contemporary Chinese politics. The argument advanced in this particular video was radical: it implied that the film was actually an expression of longing for the Cultural Revolution, that the male protagonist was a stand-in for Wang Hongwen — a young rebel leader during the Cultural Revolution — and that the Reform and Opening Up era represented a “betrayal” of the Maoist line. Had the Cultural Revolution continued, the argument went, China could have followed a more equitable path. These readings are, of course, distortions of the film’s intent.
The Rise and Crackdown on “Huang Han” Ethnic Nationalism
The second phenomenon arrived barely ten days later, around December 17. “Zhejiang Xuanchuan” — the official new-media account of the Zhejiang Provincial Propaganda Department and one of the most active authoritative Party media outlets — published a piece criticizing the so-called “1644 historical view”. This triggered the immediate content deletion and suspension of “Chigua Mengzhu”, a Douyin account that had exploded to over five million followers in a short period. (Both the account and related ethno-nationalist accounts were permanently deleted in March 2026.) Behind this incident was the sudden mainstreaming of “Huang Han,” a strain of racial nationalism that had grown from a fringe online subculture into a grassroots ideological wave.
“Huang Han” — literally “Imperial Han” or “Glorious Han” — is a form of Han-ethnic racial nationalism. Its core historical narrative centers on 1644, the year the Ming dynasty fell and the Manchu-led Qing dynasty was established. In this framework, Qing rule over the Han Chinese constituted nearly three centuries of “alien colonization”, and the decline of Han civilization began at that point. Adherents reject both the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty and the Qing dynasty as legitimate parts of Chinese history and assert that the Han people possess a superior national character. The liberation of the Han, or a “Han First” policy orientation, is presented as the key to China’s resurgence. Crucially, this ethno-nationalism is directed not only at foreigners but also at China’s own ethnic minorities. It frames contemporary ethnic integration policies as a form of oppression against the Han — in essence, a continuation of what it considers the Qing dynasty’s original error.
The “Kill Line” Conspiracy Theory Endorsed by Party Media
Just as public attention from these two waves was barely subsiding, a third erupted. On January 4, 2026, Qiushi — the Chinese Communist Party’s highest-level theoretical journal, functioning as the official mouthpiece for Party ideology — published an article titled “The American Political Predicament of the ‘Kill Line’“. The piece elevated a pure conspiracy theory, originating from a pseudonymous internet figure known as “Lao A,” into yet another nationwide sensation.
The backstory is even more absurd. An anonymous Bilibili account using the handle “Lao A” had been posting large volumes of purportedly documentary content about American society, claiming to work as a body collector in the United States. According to these posts, America operates an invisible “kill line” — when an ordinary American’s income drops below a certain threshold, they are systematically abandoned or even eliminated by the system. The content is saturated with fabricated details and conspiratorial framing, yet large Chinese audiences accepted it as authentic reporting. What made this episode truly extraordinary was the response from above: Qiushi, the CCP Central Committee’s most authoritative theoretical publication, effectively endorsed the narrative. That a grassroots conspiracy theory received backing from the Party’s top ideological organ is itself a phenomenon that demands explanation.
Three viral explosions in the span of a single month, each generating an unprecedented level of discussion and public attention. But what does it mean when you consider all three together?
Neither Too Much Nor Too Little Analysis
When it comes to internet phenomena, two temptations should be resisted: over-reading every signal with elaborate interpretive frameworks, and cynically dismissing everything as either perfectly normal or a sign of imminent collapse. At the simplest level of explanation, the economy is slowing, livelihoods are strained, and ordinary citizens are turning to identity politics for a sense of security. None of this is particularly new. Add to that the amplifying effects of platform algorithms, which structurally favor polarizing and controversial content and can drive short-term viral explosions, and you have a perfectly reasonable mechanistic account.
But can the explanation stop there? I would argue the key question is what anomalies remain after these two standard explanations have been applied — and those anomalies deserve closer attention.
1) The speed and clustering of the eruptions. Three viral waves of this magnitude appearing within a single month exceeds what either economic distress or algorithmic amplification alone might predict. Moreover, each episode was generated through a distinct mechanism. The Fang Hua commentary was a concentrated viewing surge driven by a single video (in three parts). The Huang Han wave was a collectively co-created emergent phenomenon that coalesced rapidly across many users. The “kill line” trend was driven by a single account’s output, propelled outward by a core community on Bilibili — the so-called “resistance faction” (抵抗系) — using postmodern meme-culture tactics. Between them, these three episodes nearly exhaust the known generative mechanisms of Chinese internet virality. That fact alone requires explanation.
2) The intensity of their political character. China’s censored internet is no stranger to viral storms, but most take the form of gender wars, public outcry against individual elites, or other social grievances. Events that are heavily ideological — offering sweeping macro-political narratives and visions — are rare. To see three such episodes with pronounced political content erupt in quick succession is genuinely unusual.
3) The timing — during a peak censorship crackdown. These waves did not emerge during a relatively permissive period for online speech. They erupted during one of the most intense internet rectification campaigns in recent memory. Just before these trends took off, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) had launched a “Clear and Bright” campaign (清朗行动, the CAC’s standing label for its internet cleanup operations) specifically targeting “malicious incitement of negative emotions,” beginning around late September. During this cycle, crackdowns on prominent influencers reached unprecedented severity: top-tier accounts including Hu Chenfan, Zhang Xuefeng, and Lan Zhanfei were all disciplined, and Zhou Lifeng (known online as “Feng Ge” of the Tianya community), a long-active figure, went silent. It was precisely against this backdrop of maximum pressure that these intensely oppositional viral waves broke through. This, too, demands explanation.
On Closer Inspection, the Misalignment with the Party Is Only Slight
So why the Cultural Revolution, Huang Han, and the “kill line”? None of these three currents materialized out of thin air.
The Fang Hua commentary video actually sits at the intersection of two existing streams. The first is the so-called “Rang Xue” — a tradition of symbolic-political decoding that originated with Let the Bullets Fly, a 2010 film by director Jiang Wen. On the Chinese internet, the film has been read as a work saturated with political allegory, with every symbol and character subjected to multiple layers of interpretation. “Rang Xue” (literally “the study of Let the Bullets Fly“) refers to the entire system of coded political discussion that grew up around it, and this interpretive grammar became a staple mode of political commentary on Bilibili. The second stream is Mao Zedong worship and Cultural Revolution nostalgia, which has become something close to an established school of thought on the platform. (In China, Cultural Revolution nostalgia in less explicit forms is tolerated.) I previously analyzed the phenomenon of youth-driven Mao worship in an essay titled “The Return of the Mao Cult: Success Guru and ‘God of Equality’ in Contemporary Chinese Society”. The Fang Hua commentary video was a concentrated eruption of this undercurrent.
Huang Han, for its part, is an undercurrent that has been building since the publication of Those Things in the Ming Dynasty (明朝那些事儿) in 2006 — a popular history of the Ming dynasty characterized by extensive romanticization and factual liberties, which gave rise to the “Ming fan” (明粉) community of Ming dynasty enthusiasts. From “Ming fans” to the Hanfu movement — a cultural-nationalist movement to revive traditional Han clothing, in which young people wear historical garments for cosplay or tourist photography — these groups have long constituted a potent online subculture. The current was sustained and amplified along the way by the “Western fake history” theory (西方伪史论, a conspiracy theory holding that Western history — especially that of ancient Greece and Rome — was fabricated, which commands a sizable audience in China) and by nationalist narratives surrounding the Yongle Encyclopedia (永乐大典, a Ming-era official compendium that has recently been recast in nationalist discourse as proof that Ming-dynasty China possessed scientific knowledge far surpassing the West, and that the Western scientific revolution was inspired by this work). What changed in late 2025 was the rise of the “Mourning the Ming” (悼明) trend — an online wave premised on the idea that the hidden theme of numerous novels and cultural works is grief for the fallen Ming dynasty — which propelled Huang Han from subculture into a form of racial identity politics with deep penetration into grassroots society.
The “kill line” has even deeper roots. Since 1998, the Chinese government has published an annual Human Rights Record of the United States — its counter-measure to the U.S. State Department’s annual report on China’s human rights record — systematically cataloguing alleged American human rights violations and painting a bleak picture of American society. By early 2025, the U.S. ban on TikTok drove a flood of American users onto Xiaohongshu, triggering what became known as the “Sino-American Great Reckoning” (中美大对账), a wave of cross-platform comparison that left many Chinese users convinced their everyday living standards already far exceeded America’s. All of this laid the groundwork for the “kill line” narrative.
Yet each of the three currents achieved a critical breakthrough beyond its established trajectory — and that is what transformed them into societal waves. The breakthrough was the same in all three cases: each offered an explicit, panoramic political explanation for contemporary China.
The Fang Hua commentary broke through the veiled framing that previously characterized Mao worship. Using the language of symbolic decoding, it stated plainly that the Reform and Opening Up era was a “coup” by the second generation of leaders, and that had the Cultural Revolution continued, China would have achieved far greater things. The Huang Han wave argued that the Qing dynasty’s replacement of the Ming marked the beginning of Han political dispossession, which in turn caused China’s decline as a nation — and that to this day, the state’s multi-ethnic policy perpetuates the Qing’s error. Only by reversing ethnic pluralism (which in practice subjects the Han to domination by other groups, in this telling) and reasserting Han primacy can the nation be saved. The “kill line” narrative took the opposite approach: through fantastical stories depicting an America in total disorder — utterly failed in welfare and public safety — it effectively declared that China is already a successful state and that its political system has triumphed beyond question.
Beneath all three lies a single mythic structure: a narrative of national restoration. The first promises restoration through the Cultural Revolution. The second promises restoration through ethnic purity. The third declares that restoration has already been achieved.
Readers attuned to Chinese politics will have already noticed that the CCP itself has long relied on a restoration myth as the spine of its own narrative — the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” (中华民族伟大复兴). The difference is that in the Party’s version, it is the Communist Party that accomplishes the restoration, by virtue of its ideological and organizational superiority. And here the tension emerges: if national restoration is the Party’s achievement by virtue of its own advanced nature, then alternative restoration myths risk displacing the Party from the center of that story.
Before analyzing those points of divergence and friction, however, it is worth examining how deeply these three restoration myths actually align with the Party’s own narrative. The Fang Hua commentary and its “Cultural Revolution restoration” are, at their core, a narrative of moral restoration: the nation can only be revived when genuinely good, ordinary people prevail, when elites who have hijacked the state are defeated, when corruption is rooted out, and when moral virtue is rewarded. All of this tracks closely with the Party’s own messaging. In recent years, anti-corruption campaigns and moral edification have become increasingly central to official ideology. The Huang Han current and its “ethnic restoration” are driven by an insistence on the “purity” of the group — tight solidarity, the elevation of the dominant ethnic identity — as the precondition for national revival. The Party’s recent “Sinicization” (中国化) campaigns imposed on all religions, the cultural erasure of indigenous minority communities, and the relentless repetition of the slogan “firmly forging a sense of community for the Chinese nation” (铸牢中华民族共同体意识) share an essentially identical core logic. The “kill line” narrative, with its sudden declaration that restoration is complete, echoes official triumphalism directly — consistent with the state’s rhetoric of “whole-process people’s democracy,” its poverty alleviation narrative, the “new rural construction” campaign, the rebranding of precarious employment as “flexible employment” (灵活就业), and the sustained drumbeat of anti-Americanism.
So these three outlandish new currents are, in the end, variations on the Party’s own master story of “restoration through Communist Party superiority.” Viewed from this angle, their emergence is explicable. But then why did the Party suppress all three of them, to one degree or another?
But the Misalignment Is Precisely the Point
Now we arrive at the crux of the matter. Why did these three restoration stories not serve as auxiliaries to the Party’s own narrative? Why do they generate enormous tension with the Party system instead? Why can the Party not simply absorb them as subplots within its own restoration arc?
Take Huang Han as an example. Many assume it cannot be officially endorsed because it contradicts the state’s narrative of multi-ethnic integration within the Chinese nation. But consider this carefully: in what meaningful sense do current policies in Xinjiang and Tibet still embody multi-ethnic integration? Where is the pluralism in the campaign to “Sinicize” religions? The preferential minority policies that Huang Han adherents rail against — such as “Liang Shao Yi Kuan” (两少一宽, a 1984 CCP criminal justice directive calling for fewer arrests, fewer executions, and more lenient sentencing for ethnic minority offenders) and bonus points on the gaokao (高考, the university entrance exam) for minority students — are largely relics of the past. Even the gaokao bonus has already been sharply scaled back. Conflict over ethnic policy, in other words, is not the real issue.
Another explanation — one I have offered in earlier analyses — holds that Huang Han’s rejection of the Qing dynasty threatens the legal basis for China’s current territorial claims and the chain of legal succession running from the Qing through the Republic of China to the People’s Republic. But on reflection, this may also be over-analysis. The distance between grassroots ethno-nationalist revisionism and any actual impact on China’s standing under international law remains vast.
Since the operative framework here is restoration, perhaps the answer should be sought within the structure of the restoration narrative itself. The deepest problem with Huang Han’s racial nationalism, I would argue, is this: by attributing the decline of the Han to Qing conquest, the narrative arrives at a community defined by Han ethnicity, whose revival is explained by the greatness of the Han race — by the inherent excellence of the Han people. The logical corollary is that China’s achievements today are also attributable to Han excellence. This converges, curiously, with a certain strand of liberal argument: that China’s accomplishments belong to the Chinese people, and that without Communist Party rule, those accomplishments would have been even greater. This directly subverts the “restoration through Party superiority” narrative, in which the Party is the indispensable agent of national revival. From this angle, the Party simply cannot accept Han ethno-nationalism, because under a racialist framework, the Party’s own claim to superiority dissolves. The real danger of the Huang Han narrative, then, lies in its competition for and potential displacement of the Party’s monopoly on “restoration superiority”. And this, in turn, reveals something important: the multi-ethnic narrative and the construction of a “Chinese nation” (中华民族) identity were never really about building a community as such. They were about building Party authority.
What about the Cultural Revolution narrative? If the state already champions anti-corruption, attacks entrenched privilege, and emphasizes equity and redistribution, why not merge with the Cultural Revolution narrative? The reason is that those who embrace the Cultural Revolution story genuinely believe in the absolute primacy of “the people.” There is a populist logic at work: the people possess a prior claim in morality, in the distribution of resources, and in capability. In the Party’s own restoration narrative, by contrast, the Great Rejuvenation is achieved not through the moral virtue or capability of ordinary people, but through the wise leadership and capability of the Communist Party. If capability resides in the people at the grassroots, then the Party’s claim to governing legitimacy loses its foundation. This also exposes the equality narrative in contemporary China as, at least in part, a fiction — though “fiction” alone does not capture the full picture. The dual-track welfare system (福利二元体制, the systematic gap in pensions, healthcare, housing, and other benefits between those inside the system — civil servants, employees of state institutions, and state-owned enterprises — and those outside it, such as private-sector and gig workers) is an open secret. The broad social acquiescence to this system rests on an implicit acknowledgment that Party officials and cadres are not, in fact, equal to ordinary citizens. This is precisely what the Cultural Revolution narrative refuses to tolerate.
And the “kill line”? If it declares China already victorious, surely the Party should welcome it. Indeed, this is the narrative the state currently embraces most warmly. Even Qiushi magazine weighed in, stating that the “kill line” vividly reveals the structural economic fragility of American society, that American politics has fallen into a pattern of spinning its wheels — grand political mobilization producing no actual improvement in ordinary people’s livelihoods — and that the systemic disconnect between political responsiveness and genuine social needs constitutes the structural contradiction driving America’s deepening and irreparable social fractures.
But the Party may not actually want victory declared right now — not in the terms the “kill line” believers propose, a fantasy where China’s welfare system has already surpassed America’s and China is the world’s leading country in social security. The Party’s most comfortable description of China’s developmental stage has long been: China is powerful in aggregate, large in total output, but still low in per-capita terms, with vast room for growth. This framing is not primarily about maintaining developing-country status in the international system. It is about preserving future room for development. For a state whose legitimacy rests on performance — a performance-legitimacy regime — the exhaustion of performance space would force a pivot toward procedural legitimacy. The state needs everyone to believe that room for economic and livelihood improvement still exists, rather than announcing that development is already complete. The “kill line” narrative’s sudden declaration of Chinese triumph therefore forecloses the very space on which China’s future performance legitimacy depends.
At this point, a common thread across all three currents becomes visible: a loss of faith in the existing growth model. The Cultural Revolution narrative no longer believes in the model of growth led by officials and elites — the model captured by Deng Xiaoping’s formulation of “letting some get rich first to drive prosperity for all” (先富带动后富, the core justification during the Reform and Opening era for tolerating inequality and widening wealth gaps). Huang Han no longer believes in the national growth model with the Communist Party at the helm. And the “kill line” believers have stopped waiting for the model to continue at all — they want to declare, here and now, that growth is already over. Each of these represents only a slight misalignment with the Party line. But it is precisely these slight misalignments that expose a fundamental crisis of state legitimacy: the existing growth model has run its course.
This is why, unlike previous subcultural episodes, all three events offered sweeping macro-political imaginaries — and why they resonated so powerfully across society. Their fuel is the end of the macro-political imaginary that preceded them: the performance state built on continuous economic development.
The Death of Reform-and-Opening China
This is not a small matter. After 1978, China entered the Reform and Opening model of “economic construction as the central task”. Under this model, the social contract was straightforward: rapid economic growth in exchange for recognition of “Communist Party superiority” — a recognition that implicitly entailed acceptance of a cadre elite, tolerance of the dual-track system, and acquiescence to the loss of basic freedoms.
The emergence of these three currents signals the end of that model. Observers have long warned that China’s social contract risks collapse. I raised this possibility in my own book, Chronicle of the Plague Years (疫年纪事). But when does the contract actually expire? I would argue that the appearance of these three currents marks precisely that moment.
This, however, is not a conclusion. It is a beginning. If the horizon of Reform-and-Opening China has closed, what comes next? It will certainly not be Huang Han, the Cultural Revolution, or the declaration that China has already succeeded. The logic behind all three is not a logic of growth but a logic of security — of ideological security construction. And a security narrative cannot serve as a society’s future. What this tells us is that the stock of usable intellectual resources the Party can offer society has been exhausted.
The irony is acute: the moment when social currents surge is precisely the moment when China’s intellectual resources have run dry — the moment when “security logic” and “security thinking” have expanded beyond what even the state itself can sustain.
What comes next? That truly consequential question may now be surfacing.