latest line of propaganda being pushed on the Chinese internet, I suspect, in response to the kids breaking the internet calling for a revival of Cultural Revolution just a few weeks ago

this is such a garbage take lol, if this was the case why hasn't shit like 群丁 been taken down after over a year? because the cpc wants to incite anti tibetan racism? surely the cpc propaganda angle explains why 牢a's stream was banned by bilibili management a week after the original execute threshold upload.

you can conspiracize the other side too: the 芳华 incident is a redux of the 吴京 bobblehead meme, necro'd some obscure and irrelevant cultural artifact from half a decade ago that no one actually cared about and pumped the numbers with artificial engagement, resulting in extremely mid flash in a pan memes with staying power only so long as the money kept flowing.

it's funny because 牢a was actually not particularly popular before, he was affiliated with 大角鼠, 瓜哥, 红幻 and the other wh40k nationalists but didn't get much exposure because his content was mostly just telling anecdotes and urban legends he heard from working with homeless people in seattle (embellished for the audience obviously). the video that went viral and the originator of the execute threshold meme was an entirely realistic account of the american health care process for a comparatively major disease or injury. LITERALLY all he did was describe how your standard american would go from primary care to a specialist to treatment and the role health insurance played in the process and approximately how long this whole thing would take. while he did make belittling comparisons to how the entire thing was like getting hit with shadow demon's (a dota hero) shadow poison ability (which is where the execute threshold meme comes from, you're gonna get hit hard after 3 stacks regardless), compared to his other dumb stories it was actually very down to earth and dare i say realistic.

the tangping movement has actually been losing momentum because everyone just relocating to back to their hometowns or lower cost cities which are actually no longer miserable and have reasonable cost of living to salary ratios. there is a dialectical process going on here because underdeveloped interior cities are benefiting from this at the cost of the coastal ones, which has been a stated goal of the cpc for a while, but obviously there are interest groups on the coast (entrenched export oriented manufacturing) that would prefer either staying in place or moving out of the country to somewhere cheaper altogether. i would say that the youth, while unhappy about the job market, benefitted a lot from the housing market getting taken down (to give xhs the benefit of the doubt, lets just assume salary growth has been nil over the past 5 years, but housing prices dropped like 30% while durable goods also went down in the double digits. are you really going to be that mad?). it was only really the petit bourgeoisie that had investment properties that got hit hard: it's not like you're going to be losing any wealth if you only have the one house that you're already living in or if you were already renting. coincidentally, a lot of those same petit bourgeoisie got rich off of cheap exports over the past two decades and are being forced to either upvalue, relocate or die, so the doomerism that xhs is describing is mostly just a malaise of the extremely vocal would be parasites. unsubstantiated, but the actual proles have been getting assfucked ever since the infrastructure boom began in 2010 and tend to be on platforms like kuaishou and tiktok, wouldn't trust bilibili with anything considering the demographics of its management and its userbase even if they used to be social rejects. though tbf tiktok and kuaishou lean a bit too far in the other direction...

I have two questions regarding your old comments that you linked to:

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

Isn't it literally true that the CR under Mao was hijacked by elites from early on? Specifically, that CPC bureaucrats basically agitated their own right factions of the Red Guards in opposition to Mao's left factions and that's a major element of why it devolved into a sort of highly-disorganized civil war? Aside from the fact that a lot of it became about local blood feuds and turf wars even beyond what local bureaucrats helped instigate. It also seems a little like you reference there really being an elite abusing things later in your comments, but perhaps I'm misreading you paraphrasing the guy who made the video.

Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something. Obviously, I'm not about to defend the Gang of Four, and Mao's approach throughout this period merits a great deal of criticism too.

Now that the kids are increasingly realizing that they do not, in fact, live in the socialism as portrayed everywhere in the media, and that this is in fact, not the Marxism they were taught in school, suddenly they begin to question everything.

You go on to talk about it being co-opted, but what Marxism do kids actually learn in a normal education in the PRC?