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China vibe report: something absolutely wild took place on the Chinese internet this past week and I’ll be the first to report it. The kids are NOT ok!

TL;DR: Chinese Gen Z kids went full ultra Gang of Four yearning for a revival of the Cultural Revolution on bilibili (Chinese Youtube), what the hell is going on?

This came absolutely out of nowhere and took everyone by surprise. It’s truly one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen in the many years I’ve spent on the Chinese side of the internet.

It started with one of those Movie Explained channels offering analysis and interpretation of films. Run of the mill stuff. About a month ago, one of those channels began to upload a deconstruction of the 2017 film 芳华 (Youth), a coming of age/loss of innocence movie set in the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution about the lives and drama of the military art troupe kids, based on Yan Geling’s novel of the same name, which has been suspected to be her own semi-autobiography.

The film itself wasn’t overtly political or anything. It wasn’t without controversy before the theatrical release due to the Cultural Revolution backdrop, but after extensive cutting and reediting, the film was eventually released and went on the become one of the highest grossing films of the year.

However, the Movie Explained guy (no doubt on the more extreme/ultra left) offered a re-interpretation of the film, painting the Cultural Revolution as being hijacked by the elites from the very beginning, and after the reform and opening up era, the Gang of Four was vilified by the liberal reformers who rewrote history. Wild conspiracy take but what’s even wilder was the response to the videos (which have been released in three parts, with the final part that came out on November 29th being the most controversial, which essentially reinterpreted the film’s male protagonist as Wang Hongwen).

To give you an idea of what an absolute phenomenon this is, the three videos have a combined 37+ million views before the censorship hammer fell. Averaging about 12 million views per video, this is an insane number for bilibili, and was trending #1 at the time the videos were “disappeared” by the censors. As a comparison, the most sensational anti-Japan videos garnered about 2-3 million views at most - this is easily 4-5 times the volume of that.

Imagine Youtube’s #1 trending video. That’s how huge it was. This was never seen before for a politically themed video, let alone one on the Cultural Revolution.

And because bilibili has what is called the “bullet comments”, where user comments stream across the screen while a video is being played, and with hundreds of thousands of comments here’s what the screen looked like:

人民万岁 = Long Live the People. Slogan of the Cultural Revolution.

Clearly the kids are more into Cultural Revolution than anti-Japanese propaganda. What the hell is going on?

Let’s start with the film’s story to give some contexts:

The story is the typical rich kids bullying poor kids story. The male protagonist was a model socialist youth, who embodied the ideal of a revolutionary, always offering help to anyone without expecting anything in return, but because of his lower class, was always taken advantage of and held in disdained by the other elite/rich kids who were in the art troupe for “performative” reasons.

The female protagonist was a girl whose father was in the reeducation camp, and naively believed that by joining the communist youth cadre, she would be treated as equals. Instead, because of her lower class, she ended up getting bullied throughout by the elite/rich kids.

This scene from the film has been memed all over the chat groups right now and embodied the class divide that had infected the Cultural Revolution even from its very onset:

The elite kids (官二代, or 2nd generation elites) and rich kids (富二代) were able to enjoy special privileges in the “revolution” while looking down at the other kids from the lower classes. Such distinct class divide amongst the communist youth cadres, in a way, showed that the Cultural Revolution was doomed from the start.

The ending was particularly bleak:

The ending in the novel was even more bleak. The film version actually made some adjustments to make it seem more bittersweet.

Strangely enough, when the film was aired in 2017, nobody really thought too much about it. It was mostly seen as a nostalgic film for the 50s/60s elderly who reminisced about their youth during the Cultural Revolution. The Gen Z kids were still too young/at school to appreciate its subtexts.

Remember that 2017-2019 was the peak of China’s economy. It was a time when everyone was very much positive about the future. Nobody even thought about such concerns as unemployment. As long as you’re willing to work hard, there will be jobs for you.

8 years later, the situation has completely changed. Upon re-watch, many young people, especially kids who saw it for the first time, felt the incomprehensible horror in the film itself.

Of course, visual language is everything, take a look:

At the start of the film, the red mural had a Mao painting with a hammer and sickle, which was very much emblematic of the revolutionary era.

By the time the protagonist returned in the reform era, the mural had been replaced with a red Coca-Cola advertisement, signifying the end of an era.

So how did we get here?

First of all, I do think that the re-interpretation videos had indeed over-interpreted the film itself, even though the visual languages are well representative of the latent contradictions of the time.

Second, I don’t think the Gen Z kids are really yearning for a real Cultural Revolution, widely held as the most destructive era of the PRC history.

Whether this was irony pilled Gen Z black humor, or whether they truly yearn for a rerun of the CR, it doesn’t matter. The explosive outbursts of their emotion had to be real. This was something that you could only feel when interacting with the youth, their hidden anger buried underneath, but nothing really actually manifested in real life.

Their collective outbursts in the form of bilibili comments revealed their true reaction to the film - the loss of their Youth, a funeral of their Future.

And it makes sense. As I have said before, post-Covid China is a very different world than the 2010s. Chinese kids are seeing their futures evaporating in front of them. These are the kids who studied hard for years, just to be told that there are no jobs for them, the houses are way beyond what they could possibly afford, and that a bright future that had been promised not even 10 years ago is disappearing before them.

It’s like being told that the train is already full, and you are being left behind at the train station. The train that just departed was class mobility - a door that has now shut for most Chinese youth.

They are experiencing a strong dissonance that while the country is becoming stronger, as China is becoming a world superpower, yet the fruits of the hard work do not belong to them. The future of a nation where they are not a part of.

Their anger is to be expected, and a yearning for a Cultural Revolution that at least promises shake up the entrenchment of the social classes. The chaos and destruction would hurt the rich elites the most, dragging them down to the level of the average working people who are struggling for the next paycheck.

For context, understand that the accumulation of capital that took several hundred years in Western capitalist countries, occurred in China in just 50 years. Everything has been evolving so fast, and so does the wealth inequality.

In 2007, nobody would have anticipated what China would look like today. That’s what it feels like to grow up in China. In Western countries, the wealth distribution is divided in generations, where the boomers/Gen X reaped the industrialization benefits while the Gen Y and especially Gen Zs are already accustomed to a relatively bleak future since they were born.

However, in China, this was not the experience. If you’re a Gen Z kid born in the late 1990s (in China they’re called post-90s and post-00s), you would have grown up just after the recession, with your parents having a relatively well paid job in the 2000s (compared to the 90s). Things were starting to look better. By the 2010s, in your middle and high schools, your parents likely bought a new house. An upgrade. The economy was looking better by the day. You’re promised that as long as you study hard, you’ll be able to find a good job and raise your own family one day.

Then Covid hit just when you’re about to graduate college, and the economy never returned. Years of hard work down the drain. All this rollercoaster happened in less than 30 years of your life.