The Wuhan investigators concluded that Guo’s performance had “caused a negative social impact,” but did not fine him personally, nor did they say whether he would face performing restrictions in the future. They issued punishments to the theatre and the performance organizers for violating Articles 16, 25, and 26 of the “Regulations on the Administration of Commercial Performances.” The organizers were punished with a formal warning, the confiscation of 48,687.4 yuan ($7,260 USD) in “illegal gains,” and a punitive fine of 486,874 yuan ($72,600). They were also ordered to rectify their practices and strengthen management of performers and performance content. The theatre management was given a formal warning and fined 110,000 yuan ($16,400).

Although the investigators’ statement does not specify exactly what portions of the three Articles were violated, Article 16 is a fairly straightforward regulation requiring organizers of commercial performances to submit certain materials (including a program and relevant audiovisual materials) to the local authorities in advance. This implicit stifling of improvisational elements sparked consternation late last year after an earlier brush between Guo and the authorities. Article 25 lists an expansive number of prohibitions in commercial performances, including: endangering national security, harming national honor, inciting ethnic hatred, disrupting social order or undermining social stability, harming public morality or national cultural traditions, among others. Article 26 requires venue operators or performance organizers to halt any performance that violates the provisions outlined in Article 25, and to immediately report the violation to local authorities.

The final paragraph of the report gives some hint as to the motivation and mindset behind the penalties: “Songs from the War of Resistance carry the Chinese nation’s memory of that struggle and its national sentiment, and no unit or individual will ever be permitted to distort or alter them. We will strengthen regulatory oversight in accordance with the law and earnestly safeguard the cultural marketplace."

CDT Chinese editors have archived a now-deleted post from WeChat account 难得君 (Nándéjūn), which discusses what the punishments bode for Guo Degang’s future career, and for the world of comedy in general. In "The Penalty Against Guo Degang Has Been Handed Down, But Is He Still Allowed to Perform?" Nandejun describes the ambiguity of the investigators’ brief report, and argues that their conclusions and the punishments they meted out represent a kind of face-saving compromise. Below is a translated excerpt from that censored article:

But what’s truly interesting is what wasn’t included in the announcement.

There is no performance ban, nor any explicit prohibition against Guo Degang performing on stage.

The announcement only stated that "those involved will be dealt with seriously." This wording leaves a lot of room for interpretation, certainly enough to give pause to those who prematurely declared that Guo Degang was “finished.”

The punishment has been handed down; the other shoe has dropped. But whether Guo Degang can still take the stage and perform crosstalk or Peking Opera remains unanswered in the official announcement.

Not providing an answer is itself an answer.

[…] The official statement was strongly worded, using terms like "distortion and falsification" and "negative social impact," applying all the appropriate characterizations. But the actual penalties were limited to fines, rectification, and “serious” disciplinary action. There was no ban on performances, no revocation of licenses, and no "complete end" of the issue.

This achieved two things: it addressed the public opinion storm, but also left the industry a way out.

This is not about appeasement. It’s about finding a balance in the complex public-opinion landscape that manages to uphold the bottom line without completely cutting off all avenues of communication.

Two opposing viewpoints seem to prevail online: one seeks to destroy Guo Degang and make things worse by escalating the issue, while the other argues that when it comes to crosstalk, any subject is fair game for jokes.

What the investigators’ report represents is an attempt to chart a new path between those two extremes. [Chinese]

Discontent has occasionally erupted after disasters, scandals or particularly brutal government actions. But something feels different lately. The pessimism is persistent. It has become part of the everyday social media feed, and can sometimes turn subversive.

China’s economic growth is slowing. A prolonged property crash has eroded the value of many families’ biggest asset while jobs have become harder to find and less secure. As the malaise deepens, more social media users are abandoning a cheery, compliant public performance and creating counternarratives that censorship can sometimes erase but not easily rebut.

Across RedNote, Douyin, Weibo and other popular platforms, you can scroll endless posts about meager wages, scarce jobs, falling property values and fear about the future. Some turn their hardships into dark humor. Others hijack official posts and hashtags and turn propaganda into spectacles of mockery.

China’s censorship apparatus still controls the internet. But prolonged economic distress is making it harder for the party to maintain its preferred account of how the country is doing. [Source]

Numerous recent translations at CDT have shown the discontent Li describes, such as disillusionment about traditional paths to success, retreat into slacking or Maoist nostalgia, and widespread frustration with the restricted online speech environment even for positive content.

While expressions of bleakness and frustration abound, the space for substantive critique or discussion of the issues behind them continues to narrow. The Economist Chaguan column discussed this constriction this week, highlighting two recent examples previously covered by CDT’s translations: the investigation of comedian Guo Degang for "vulgarizing" an old Communist song, and tight control over coverage of devastating flooding in Tibet.

[…] China still has plenty of commentary beyond pure state media, especially in “public accounts” on WeChat. Yet anyone posting there knows that taboo topics get accounts closed, a strong incentive to play it safe. More recently, artificial intelligence has given censors great power to survey the digital landscape in all its vastness and to speedily delete undesirable content. The party used to be a big step behind China’s once-rumbustious online chats; now it undoubtedly has the upper hand, says Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times, a site that monitors censorship.

It is natural to think about what the state blocks, be it foreign websites or domestic critics. But the system is far more ambitious than that. The bigger goal is to manage “the broader information landscape such that it alters what citizens know, and even what they think”, Jessica Batke and Laura Edelson wrote last year in a sweeping analysis for the Asia Society about how China controls its internet. [See CDT’s interview with Batke and Edelson.] Residents of China can still tunnel outside the country’s online firewall to see what the rest of the world is talking about. But only a small minority are so motivated, and even if someone forms dissenting views, they cannot transport them back into Chinese online discussions. Mr Xiao says his team manages to archive just one or two posts per day before they are wiped from the internet. And they have become “less and less interesting”, often quite minor in their critical scope—testimony, he believes, to China’s well-oiled information-control machine.

[…] What is lost in all of this? Limits on free speech hurt China, by making it harder to spot problems early and deal with them rationally. They may ultimately hurt the party, too, by letting grievances bubble undebated until they boil over. Yet that is surely not what China’s leaders think. They have their own internal sources of information; the public, in their view, need not be concerned by affairs of the state. This is what they have been building towards. For the party, the power to set the agenda in the modern age—to control so much of what people see and say—is a triumph. [Source]

Nearly two weeks after an upstream glacial collapse destroyed the border crossing and inundated many villages in its path, Nepalese authorities have confirmed a death toll of at least 1,342, with 4,886 people still missing and search and rescue efforts ongoing. On the Tibet side, Chinese authorities have confirmed that 43 people died and 519 remain missing. Information and independent reporting in Tibet continue to be tightly controlled, with Chinese state media focusing on government rescue efforts rather than on the human toll of the disaster. The slow pace of information release, notable lack of survivor and eyewitness testimony, and strict online censorship of the topic have raised concerns among Tibetan advocacy and human rights groups that the Chinese government may be concealing the true scale of the disaster.

The following is a translation of a CDT Chinese article about a bulletin from the Ministry of Public Security’s Cybersecurity Bureau. The bulletin listed ten recent cases in which Chinese netizens were given administrative punishments for discussing or speculating about the Gyirong Port disaster and death toll on various online platforms:

On August 31, the Ministry of Public Security’s Cybersecurity Bureau announced that cybersecurity units nationwide are continuing the "Clean Web 2026" campaign, targeting online rumors related to the Gyirong Port mudslide disaster in Shigatse, Tibet. The campaign is aimed at cracking down on the “fabrication of false disaster information” that “misleads the public and disrupts online order,” in order to ensure disaster-relief efforts proceed smoothly. Ten representative cases were announced.

1. Qamdo, Tibet: an individual surnamed Qiu was given an administrative penalty for fabricating and spreading false disaster information online. Qiu wrote, "The news said 1,400 died, but there were already 3,000 missing."

2. Lhasa, Tibet: an individual surnamed Liu was given an administrative penalty for spreading false disaster information online. Liu wrote, "More than 3,000 people have already died on the Chinese side."

3. Lhasa, Tibet: an individual surnamed Tan was given an administrative penalty for spreading false disaster information online. Tan wrote, "Several thousand lives were lost in an instant at Gyirong Port in Shigatse."

4. Lhasa, Tibet: an individual surnamed Zhang was given an administrative penalty for spreading false disaster information online. Zhang wrote, "Though it’s obvious over a thousand people were swept away, officials reported only three dead and 265 missing," and "There were nearly 200 border-crossing staff, 500-600 construction workers, plus tourists and people crossing the border. That’s at least a thousand, already."

5. Lhasa, Tibet: an individual surnamed Pan was given an administrative penalty for spreading false disaster information online. Pan wrote, "Over 1,000 people were buried by today’s mudslide.”

6. Lhasa, Tibet: an individual surnamed Yi was given an administrative penalty for spreading false disaster information online. Yi wrote, "It’s not that serious. About 500 people probably died, and the missing are probably all dead, too."

7. Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture, Hunan province: an individual surnamed Zhou was given an administrative penalty for spreading false disaster information on a short-video platform. Zhou wrote: "[The flooding in] Guangxi isn’t even over yet, and now there’s a mudslide in Tibet. I heard over ten thousand died, but I don’t know if it’s true, there hasn’t been an official announcement yet" and "A mudslide here killed 20 to 30 people last year" and "It must be in the thousands. This mudslide wiped out an entire village, and that’s more than a thousand people right there."

8. Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia: an individual surnamed Guo was given an administrative penalty for spreading false disaster information in a video comment section. Guo wrote, "At least a thousand people."

9. Nanchang, Jiangxi province: an individual surnamed Yang was given an administrative penalty for spreading false disaster information on a short-video platform. Yang wrote, "826 people are now missing, it’s so heartbreaking!"

10. Chongqing, Sichuan: an individual surnamed Yang was given an administrative penalty for posting a false death toll for the Gyirong Port mudslide in a comment under a short video. [Chinese]

CDT Chinese editors have also compiled some Chinese-language comments posted to X in response to the punishments for allegedly “spreading rumors” online:

humuceasie84566: Lousy at rescuing people, but quick at arresting them.

shl6699shl: The statement “Around 500 people probably died” is only false if you don’t count Chinese people as “people.”

yc20050302: Controlling speech is one area where “China speed” is actually a real thing.

jojochrry: If you guess [the death toll] right, it’s “leaking state secrets.” If you guess wrong, it’s “spreading rumors.” Either way, you’re screwed.

pakelouder: It’s obvious that 3,000 people died, but [the authorities] said it was only 1,000. They’re lying—arrest them!

sakuya55531775: We plebs have no business debating the facts. The only genuine wares come from the “imperial kiln.” Everything else is “rumors.”

xianggangdaxue: If only the flood victims had spread rumors right before they died, they might have been tracked down and rescued in time.

liangwangCC: In China, a "person" doesn’t even rate as a statistic.

pakelouder: Whelp, guess that solves the problem, right?

XJP_64: They’re bad at rescuing people, but top-notch at silencing them. After all, that’s their stock-in-trade. [Chinese]

All platforms, please find, delete, and block video that fully or partially matches the attached samples. Use OCR to extract text for automatic deletion and blocking, and supplement with ASR [Automatic Speech Recognition] [Chinese]

Task ID: 2026[redacted]; Status: Acknowledged; Task title: sample-based search, delete, and block; Issued: 2026[redacted]; Response level: 1; Action deadline: 10 minutes; Task content: [see blockquote]

This directive, which emerged last week via the X account Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher, was reportedly issued in June by the Cyberspace Administration of China. The targeted video is part of a series on Wang Hongwen, a key Party figure during the Cultural Revolution, by former CCTV journalist Chai Jing. The apparent use of video fingerprinting was also seen in recent censorship related to catastrophic flooding in Tibet. It is unclear whether the ban applies to the series as a whole or this particular installment, but tests by CDT Chinese editors indicated that direct searches for Wang’s name on the video-sharing platform Bilibili appeared effectively blocked, returning only irrelevant results. Chai’s series tracked, in two parts, Wang’s trajectory from obscurity at a Shanghai cotton mill to his selection as Mao’s successor and membership in the Gang of Four, before his ignominious downfall, torture, and imprisonment. A further installment, the one identified in the directive’s attached sample, responded to viewer questions about the story of Shi Yunfeng, a contemporary critic of the Cultural Revolution who was investigated at Wang’s orders, tried for counterrevolutionary activity—the same charge Wang would later face himself—and executed, reportedly with his throat anesthetized and his mouth stuffed with gauze and sealed with medical suture thread to prevent him from continuing to protest his innocence. A series of posts on Chai’s Substack newsletter covered much of the same ground in writing.

Chai herself first came to international prominence with the 2015 release of her viral self-funded documentary Under The Dome, which examined China’s air pollution crisis, and was soon suppressed. Chai is now active on international channels such as YouTube and Substack. Last year, CDT published full translations of two of her interviews, with "Macaron," a Chinese mercenary then fighting for Russia in Ukraine, and Gao Binghan, a survivor of the Chinese civil war who fled to Taiwan.

Popular interest in Wang Hongwen spiked late last year, fueled by a viral three-part analysis on Bilibili of Feng Xiaogang’s 2017 film 芳华 Fanghua, or "Youth," about a military performance troupe in southwest China from the 1970s to the 1990s. As Shijie Wang explained at ChinaTalk in January:

The climax of this saga occurred on November 29, when “Liao Hui Dian Ying Ba” uploaded his third analysis of Fanghua. Perhaps frustrated by persistent questions in his private messages, he began the video by declaring that he would no longer hide behind euphemisms; instead, he would explicitly reveal the film’s “true” political agenda. In doing so, he completely overturned the official verdict on the Cultural Revolution found in Chinese history textbooks. He claimed that Fanghua was, in fact, telling the suppressed true history of a “great people’s revolution” now concealed by today’s entrenched elites.

He argued that the protagonist, Liu Feng (刘峰) — a moral paragon within the military who is eventually abandoned by his superiors and marginalized by the elite during the Reform era — is a proletarian hero. To this creator, Liu Feng symbolizes Wang Hongwen (王洪文), the factory worker who rose to the Politburo Standing Committee and became a member of the hugely influential Gang of Four, only to be purged by elites after the “failure” of the Cultural Revolution. Conversely, the other characters represent the business elites and “red aristocracy” associated with the Deng Xiaoping faction — the very targets Mao Zedong sought to eliminate during the Revolution. The film’s ending, which finds Liu Feng in abject poverty while his former peers become real estate tycoons or emigrate to the West, was interpreted as a symbol of the revolution’s betrayal. It was the fulfillment of Mao’s greatest fear: the comeback of the capitalist elites. At the end of the video, the creator affectionately referred to Mao as “Big Brother” (老大哥), asserting that Mao’s vision was simply “too far ahead of its time” for people to grasp, leading to the regretful state of contemporary China. [Source]

The piece goes on to explain how, despite Bilibili’s swift removal of the videos and their creator’s account, this interpretation found fertile soil in the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist quarters Shijie Wang refers to as the "Net Left." "They do not long for the actual, blood-soaked history," Shijie Wang clarifies, "but for a political fantasy — one purified by a mosaic narrative and saturated with the colors of absolute equality and the smashing elites."

Bing Xiao also commented on Wang Hongwen’s current resonance on Substack in January:

[…] For young people trapped at the bottom of rigid hierarchies, facing disappearing promotion paths and stagnant prospects, Wang’s trajectory has become a taboo fantasy of outsider breakthrough. When the ladder of social mobility is withdrawn, violent and abrupt rupture begins to look like the only imaginable alternative.

[…] Under conditions of dense censorship, direct language of protest has lost circulation space. Young people instead seize upon historical figures that cannot be fully erased from official narrative, yet still carry radical genetic material. By circulating Wang Hongwen’s image—often through visual stand-ins rather than his actual likeness—they package anger at class rigidity and despair over blocked mobility into a symbol that remains, at least technically, legitimate.

This strategy also draws on a long Chinese tradition of “using the past to satirize the present.” In Chinese political culture, history has never been a neutral archive. It is a coded language of struggle. The most famous modern example occurred in 1966 [sic] itself, when Yao Wenyuan, one of the “Gang of Four,” attacked the historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, arguing that it allegorically criticized contemporary leadership. That essay ignited the Cultural Revolution. It demonstrated that in China, to narrate history is rarely to reminisce—it is to settle accounts with the present. [Source]

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011.

In addition to highlighting the increasing risks of climate change to Himalayan communities, the collapse and flooding have also drawn attention to Chinese authorities’ unrelenting efforts to clamp down on and control the tone of information in the wake of natural disasters. Chinese and overseas netizens alike have noted the stark asymmetry between the regular updates and open information sharing from Nepalese authorities, and the tight press controls, limited information sharing, and lack of first-person survivor accounts on the Chinese side. Recent reports that ten people in Tibet have been punished for “spreading rumors” online about the flooding only serve to reinforce these observations.

CDT Chinese editors have been tracking online censorship of video and images of the flooding, as well as search censorship on various platforms and muting of Weibo topics related to the flooding, death toll, number of missing, and other disaster-related information. Their observations closely match the well-established playbook for handling of accidents and disasters, in which narratives are aggressively steered toward "positive energy" about government-led relief efforts and away from independent accounts or scrutiny of human factors. Translated below is a CDT summary of online information controls tracked and observed in the days after the disaster:

CDT Editor’s Note: On the morning of August 26, 2026, a catastrophic mudslide struck Gyirong County in Shigatse, Tibet, destroying the main building of Gyirong Port [a major border crossing between Nepal and Tibet]. Chinese officials subsequently attributed the cause to a flood triggered by a high-elevation glacial collapse upstream. As of 1:00 a.m. on August 29, Chinese official reports put the toll at 7 dead and 554 missing in Tibet; an earlier report had broken this figure down to include 260 foreign nationals.

In the aftermath of the flooding, numerous clips of surveillance footage spread across the Chinese internet, showing the mudslide swallowing heavy trucks, vehicles reversing to escape, half a highway sheared away, and aerial panoramas of the scene. Two clips in particular—surveillance footage recording the moment Gyirong Port’s border gate was swept away—were restricted on domestic social-media platforms.

1. The Footage That Was Singled Out

Both clips appear to be from fixed surveillance cameras, showing the port’s freight parking lot and customs-and-border inspection area. A roiling flood surges down from the gorge above, water and mud sweeping away the multi-story customs building and inundating everything in sight.

The videos were first published via overseas channels such as the X account "Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher." Internet users tried repeatedly to forward these two clips via WeChat, without success. Meanwhile, surveillance footage of the same disaster from other angles, filmed during the same window of time, circulated widely on WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu (RedNote). A considerable share of this content was picked up and reposted in various formats by mainstream Chinese media accounts.

The disparity in censorship of video content seems to be occurring at the level of the images themselves, rather than the accompanying text. The platforms clearly aren’t using keyword filtering to block these videos. Whatever censorship method is being used—video fingerprinting, frame hashing, or model-based recognition of particular scenes—the result is that specific videos are being placed on a blocklist. We haven’t yet been able to determine whether this results from the dichotomy between domestic WeChat and the overseas version of the WeChat app, or from some other technology aimed at identifying these two particular videos.

The expansion of censorship from words to images is a trend CDT has documented with increasing frequency in recent years, in the course of our ongoing work tracking sensitive-word lists.

2. “Sanitized” Search Results on Xiaohongshu (RedNote)

As of August 28, CDT editors found that searching for "Tibet mudslide" on the social-media platform Xiaohongshu (RedNote) returned the following top video results:

• "Live Footage! Gyirong County, Tibet Suffers Mudslide Disaster, Resulting in Large Numbers of Casualties and Missing Persons" (CCTV.com)
• "Gyirong Port Mudslide in Tibet Leaves 3 Dead, 265 Missing; Experts: Flood Possibly Due to ‘Glacial Lake Breach’" (Chengdu Economic Daily’s “Red Star News”)
• "Before-and-After Comparison Images of the Gyirong Port Mudslide Disaster"
• "Gyirong Port Buildings Covered in Silt"

The following content appears further down in Xiaohongshu’s video search results:

• "Caused by High-Elevation Glacial Collapse! Cause of the Gyirong Port Mudslide Announced" (China News Service)
• "Mudslide Disaster in Gyirong, Tibet: Latest Figures Are Three Dead, Two Rescued, 558 Missing" (Tibet Headlines)
• "Five Warning Signs a Flash Flood Is On the Way" (a disaster-preparedness guide)

Most of the content visible in the search results consists of tabloid-style infotainment with no additional investigative reporting—a genre that has become increasingly popular in China in recent years, commonly described as "new yellow journalism" (新黄色新闻, xīnhuángsè xīnwén).

Image and headlines from Sichuan Observer (四川观察, Sìchuān Guānchá, affiliated with Sichuan Radio and Television) on Xiaohongshu
Top: Gyirong County, Tibet Suffers Mudslide Disaster, Resulting in Large Numbers of Casualties and Missing Persons
Middle: 200 technical experts and others from Beijing, Lhasa, Chengdu, Chongqing, and elsewhere have been dispatched to the disaster-stricken area
Bottom: Gyirong County, Shigatse City, Tibet

These cause-of-disaster briefings, limited casualty figures, before-and-after image comparisons, and disaster-preparedness guides are bundled together to form a complete, presentable, and internally consistent “information package.” The original surveillance footage of the border gate being swept away did briefly appear on Xiaohongshu, before vanishing from the search results page entirely.

3. Weibo’s “Trending Topics List” Shows Only Content From Verified Accounts

Based on repeated monitoring from August 27-28, Weibo’s trending topics list saw 714 instances of topics related to the Gyirong disaster falling off the list; of these, 306 topics disappeared abruptly. Among the 12 topics we chose for more in-depth research and cross-checking, several Gyirong-related subtopics displayed the same pattern: only posts from verified Weibo accounts (“blue V” accounts) remained visible on the topic page, while ordinary users’ content did not appear in the results at all. The following are some of these subtopics, with their initial position on the list, amount of time spent on the list, and their “heat score,” which is Weibo’s proprietary, algorithmically computed popularity score for each hot-search entry.

• "Tibet mudslide: 3 dead, 558 missing" at one point occupied the #1 spot on Weibo’s trending topics list. It remained on the list for 20.1 hours, and had a heat score of 704,000.

• "Tibet mudslide: 265 missing, 3 dead" likewise occupied the #1 spot on the list, where it remained for 10.9 hours, with a heat score of 1.35 million.

• "Gyirong, Tibet mudslide: 260 foreign nationals missing" and "More collapses hit the slope above the landslide dam at Gyirong Port." Both of these topics disappeared from the trending topics list in less than an hour.

• "PLA and People’s Armed Police deploy over 500 rescue personnel" once ranked #3, with a heat score of 1.79 million, and remained on the list for two hours.

• "Port police continued directing evacuation even as crowds fled" likewise stayed on the list for under an hour.

Please note that despite search results being "only from verified accounts," this is an editorial observation on our part. At present, it cannot be taken as definitive proof of censorship or soft censorship; we are including it for readers’ and researchers’ reference only.

The following is an inventory of images and news about the disaster that remains visible on Chinese domestic online platforms:

• CCTV’s before-and-after comparison images of the Gyirong disaster zone
• Before-and-after comparisons of Gyirong Port
• High-definition footage of the mudslide disaster zone relayed by a Wing Loong drone
• Footage of a drone transporting firefighters
• Footage of People’s Armed Police soldiers clearing roads
• Fire and rescue teams arriving at the core disaster zone
• Port staff moving against the crowd to evacuate people during the disaster
• Police continuing to direct evacuation even as crowds fled
• News that 30,000 packages of relief supplies were sent to support Tibet’s disaster relief
• News that Apple would donate to Tibet
• News that Premier Li Qiang arrived in Gyirong to direct emergency rescue efforts

4. A Short-Lived Clue

At 3:00 p.m. on August 27, a topic briefly appeared on the trending list — "Gyirong Port only reopened to cross-border traffic six months ago," with a heat score of 347,000 — before disappearing.

The following sequence of dates explains the backstory: on July 8, 2025, Gyirong Port suspended cross-border operations due to a catastrophic flash flood. It resumed operations on January 1, 2026, on which day it processed 425 person-crossings and 64 vehicle-crossings. On August 26, 2026, it was destroyed again by flooding and mudslides. In other words, within fourteen months, the same border crossing was cut off twice by flash flooding and mudslides.

Equally short-lived were the topics "Investigating the recurrence of geological disasters near Gyirong Port" (heat score 230,000, remained on the list for only one hour) and "Tourists say Gyirong Port used to be busy and bustling" (heat score 469,000, and only remained on the list for under an hour).

From this, we can see that questions about site selection, border infrastructure, glacial-lake and ice-collapse monitoring, and early-warning systems failed to sustain any ongoing discussion on the largest Chinese-language trending-topics list.

5. The Trajectory of the Numbers

We also tracked the trajectory of officially reported numbers of the missing and the dead.

At 11:00 p.m. on August 26, the official figures from the Chinese side were 265 missing and three dead. By the morning of August 27, this had changed to three dead and 558 missing (including 260 foreign nationals), a figure that “held steady” for roughly 36 hours. At 5:00 p.m. on August 28, it was updated to five dead and 558 missing. At 1:00 a.m. on August 29, per the latest report from Xinhua, two residents of Rexuo Village had been rescued, and there were seven dead and 554 still missing.

Within that same window of time, reports from the Nepalese side of the border, as relayed on Weibo, climbed steadily from 157 dead, to 270, to 289, to 359. As of 6:00 a.m. on August 29, per the latest data from Nepali police, the death toll had risen to 616.

We believe this looks less like a mass takedown campaign, and more like a finely calibrated operation: one in which public-opinion guidance is accomplished through a saturated information environment, rather than through wholesale post deletion. [Chinese]

A still from the film features animation so bad it beggars belief. The subtitle at bottom reads, “Niu Lai.”

A five-year labor-of-love produced on a shoestring budget by mother/son team Sun Lifang and Xin Yumeng, “The Cow Comes” is a dreamlike coming-of-age tale about a calf named Niu Lai who grows up to be a brave warrior. In its first ten days of theatrical release, the film sold fewer than 300 tickets nationwide, earning about 7,000 yuan ($1,040). But when reviewers and social media users started circulating clips of the film’s astonishingly bad graphics, awkward dialogue, and bizarre plot, audiences began flocking to see it in theatres. Thus far, the film has officially surpassed 40 million yuan ($6 million) in box-office revenue, and is projected to gross over 100 million yuan (nearly $15 million).

“The Cow Comes” has inspired a flood of memes and media coverage.

Moviegoers and theater employees alike have described a carnival-like atmosphere during screenings of the film: audiences laugh uproariously, mockingly recite the dialogue, talk back to the screen, and take videos which are often later shared online. Many theaters, unprepared for the film’s success and lacking publicity posters, resorted to displaying crudely hand-drawn posters, which themselves became objects of online ridicule.

Poster at left: “In Ultra HD 4K: The Cow Comes. Limited-time screening. Utterly bizarre. Caveat emptor: No refunds!!! No refunds!!! Badasses come to watch this badass cow! (The director didn’t give us a poster, so we had to draw our own.)”
Poster at right: “The Cow Comes—to the Big-Screen International Theater, Fusheng Branch, Changsha. This film is all about the lulz. No substance whatsoever.”

There has been considerable backlash to the film’s success, including criticism from some CCTV-affiliated outlets, an article in The Beijing News calling the film “nonsensical,” and reports that authorities in Dalian (where the creators are based) were worried the film’s success would harm the city’s reputation. There have also been rumors that Chinese authorities might actually ban the film, a kill-the-vibe approach that calls to mind 2024’s short-lived “night cycling to Kaifeng” trend. Some netizens have accused China’s film authorities and critics of hypocrisy. One Xiaohongshu user pointed out the anomalous treatment of state-backed and grass-roots film successes: “‘Ne Zha’ was called ‘a blockbuster,’ but ‘The Cow Comes’ is being called ‘an anomaly.’”

CDT Chinese editors have archived nine articles exploring various aspects of the Niu Lai phenomenon. Only one of the articles appears to have been censored—blogger Xiang Dongliang’s humorous reworking of Wen Yiduo’s famed 1925 poem “Dead Water.” Xiang’s final stanza preserves most of the original, but replaces the word “ugliness” with the titular cow: "In this ditch of stagnant water / No Hope nor Beauty can be found / So why not let the Cow Come at it / And see what kind of World comes out."

An archived article from WeChat account 难得君 (Nándéjūn) discusses negative reactions to the film’s success from Chinese directors and other film industry professionals, some of whom argue that it represents a death-knell for Chinese cinema, a glaring example of “bad money driving out good money” at the box office. The author refutes this argument by giving examples of supposedly “good” cinematic fare that turned out to be tax dodges, Ponzi schemes, critical failures, or box office bombs. One example is director Guan Hu’s 200 million yuan ($30 million USD) "A Man and a Woman," a pandemic-era quarantine drama set in Hong Kong. When it was released in 2026, after two years of delays, it earned a paltry 3.85 million yuan (about $560,000) in ticket sales, prompting one reviewer to call its bloated production and promotion budget “legalized robbery” (合法抢劫, héfǎ qiǎngjié). A portion of Nandejun’s article, “The Success of ‘The Cow Comes’ Isn’t Bad Money Driving Out Good; It’s the Audience’s Silent Protest,” is translated below:

Audiences are flocking to theaters with one clear purpose: to see just how bad this film could possibly be.

“I watched for an hour,” said one filmgoer, “and laughed the whole hour." One theater in [Hebei’s provincial capital of] Shijiazhuang was about 80% full, with laughter echoing throughout the venue.

A viewer in Wuhan said that by the end of the movie, “My mind had gone blank. Is this really the state of animation modeling technology in 2026? Even AI couldn’t dream up such an outlandish plot.”

Another said, “You’ll regret the 86 minutes you spent watching it, but if you don’t watch it, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

Tickets cost 20 yuan ($3). For the price of a fast-food meal, you get to be part of a carnival that’s taken the internet by storm, with the added bonus of an evening filled with laughter. For many people, that’s well worth the price of admission.

Nobody actually cares about the plot. What matters is the sense of participation.

[…] The audience isn’t stupid. When they buy tickets to see "The Cow Comes," there’s likely a subtext to their laughter.

The supreme irony is that—in an industry where big directors, big stars, and big investors pile into "blockbusters" that nobody watches—this little cobbled-together mess of a film is playing to packed houses.

Some claim that "The Cow Comes" is a case of "bad money driving out good." But if "good money" means burning through 200 million yuan only to earn 3.85 million at the box office, shouldn’t we rethink our definition of "good money"?

Film is an art form for the masses. The survival of the industry and everyone in it depends on the public’s willingness to shell out to see their films. But at a time when film-awards bodies treat audiences like fools, when producers treat investors like ATMs, and when disastrously bad amateur animation becomes the most talked-about thing in cinema … it probably isn’t a victory for “The Cow Comes” per se, so much as the audience voicing their profound discontent in the most absurd way possible. [Chinese]

Another archived piece is “‘The Cow Comes’ Is So Bad It’s Good: It No Longer Matters Whether Movies are Good or Not,” from WeChat account 冰川思享号 (Bīngchuān Sīxiǎnghào, recently rebranded as “Iceberg Institute,” formerly translated by CDT as “Glacier Think Tank”). The article compares the viral animated hit to other “so-bad-its-good” films and songs, and discusses what this says about the state of the Chinese film industry and the tastes of Chinese audiences. Later in the article, the author addresses rampant online rumors that Chinese film authorities might pull the movie from theaters, and if so, the “Streisand effect” this will have:

A lot of people are demanding to know how a film this bad could possibly pass muster with the censors. I suspect this question reflects a misunderstanding of how the film censorship review system actually works.

As long as a film’s content doesn’t cross any red lines, and it meets the technical safety standards required for theatrical release, it will generally pass review. As a fairytale coming-of-age tale of a young calf, “The Cow Comes” naturally poses no problem on that front.

So a film can have schlocky visuals, tragic animation, and a ridiculous plot, but none of that stands in the way of it getting the "Dragon Seal" of approval. The minimum threshold for passing review is “whether it can be shown in theaters,” not “whether it’s any good.”

The fact that a film as insanely bad as "The Cow Comes" even made it into theaters is, in itself, insane. But there’s even more insanity in store: if the film gets pulled from theaters on the grounds of "public mockery,” then it will no longer be a movie, but a crowd-sourced work of modern performance art.

The irony is that removing the film from theaters would instantly cede the moral high ground to those who were heretofore just goofing around and making memes. Niche consumers of bad movies would morph into staunch defenders of freedom of expression. The recent "bamboo cicada" incident serves as a cautionary tale. [This refers to Huawei drawing unwanted attention after the telecom titan tried to crack down on a meme-driven wooden toy it felt was mocking its corporate image.]

That’s why the cost of pulling "The Cow Comes" from theaters would be far greater than simply letting it fade away on its own. Allowing it to quietly finish its theatrical run and be forgotten is the safest course of action. Any meddling would hand it a significance it doesn’t deserve. [Chinese]

In a similar vein, lawyer and legal-affairs blogger Yan Senlin talks about online rumors that authorities might curtail screenings of the film, fueled by members of the public who are calling for an outright ban, and the important distinction between “criticism” and “bans”:

I’m not certain whether the rumors about “The Cow Comes” being pulled from theaters are true or not, but I want to reiterate this: As long as the production and approval processes were legal and compliant, then no matter how bad the film is, it has the right to continue being screened. It can be mocked, but it mustn’t be banned.

I would go a step further and say that only under a more relaxed and tolerant institutional framework is it truly possible for “100 varieties of film to bloom,” or for the film industry to achieve genuine prosperity.

One thing I’ve always worried about is people’s tendency to demand government intervention at the drop of a hat, whenever anything displeases them. This phenomenon is particularly distressing in the cultural and publishing fields. Objectively speaking, the creative space in those fields is already quite limited, so if the public goes on making complaints and clamoring for regulation to resolve aesthetic differences of opinion, it will only further curtail that space.

Today, "The Cow Comes” might be banned for being crappy; tomorrow, a film you like might be subsumed by the same logic, banned because it doesn’t suit the aesthetic preferences of some other group. It’s a game in which no one is safe, and no one ever truly wins.

That we so often fall into this confusion may, in some sense, be due to the lack of a stable middle ground in our public discourse. Between singing the praises of something and vilifying it, there ought to be an ample middle ground that allows people to say, “I don’t like it, but I’ll defend its right to exist”

This “buffer zone” is the fertile soil essential for nourishing cultural criticism, and its existence is a sign of a society’s intellectual maturity.

Let criticism be criticism, let the market be the market, and let power, if it does insist on intervening, at least be governed by law. [Chinese]

Lastly, an article from blogger and social commentator Wang Yongzhi, who writes under the pen name Wang Wusi and publishes on the serially reincarnated WeChat account New New New Silence. Wang, who once worked as an animator himself, argues that “The Cow Comes” has a kind of clumsy sincerity, an authenticity that audiences seem to appreciate—especially compared to the often preachy, disingenuous, or inauthentic state-approved films frequently promoted at the box office. Wang characterizes the success of this little-film-that-could as an expression of long-simmering public frustration with Chinese cinema, a “revenge vote” by Chinese filmgoers:

Box office receipts for the film “The Cow Comes” keep climbing. As a veteran animator, I can tell at one glance that this film is bad, glaringly bad. But compared to the multitude of big-budget blockbusters with shiny packaging and vapid plots, its badness is sincere: it isn’t trying to deceive anyone, or masquerade as anything other than what it is. It’s so bad that it’s transcendent: in other words, in a Chinese film industry so packed with bad movies, it is so far ahead of the pack that the descriptive “bad” doesn’t do it justice.

The viral popularity of “The Cow Comes” is not, at its heart, a ringing endorsement of the film itself, but a product of pent-up frustration with Chinese cinema, a "revenge vote" on the part of the moviegoing public. In recent years, Chinese filmmakers have flooded the market with all manner of bad movies, churned out on an industrial scale. There are slapdash scripts, casts crammed with celebrities, and wall-to-wall marketing blitzes, but when we show up to the theater, what we often find are shoddy, phoned-in, straight up crappy films. And to make matters worse, they won’t even let us say they’re crap. “The Cow Comes” is the exact opposite of this: it’s openly, unreservedly, guilelessly bad. It doesn’t try to use dim lighting to hide its flaws, or fast cuts to disguise how low-budget it is: every crude polygon, textural glitch, and clip-art error is on open display, projected onto a twenty-meter-wide screen. You could call it garbage, and the producers wouldn’t even argue with you.

This is who Chinese moviegoers are. No one loves Chinese cinema more than they do. They don’t ask for much, just sincerity. As long as you don’t lie to them, they’re patient enough, and willing to wait for Chinese cinema to “come of age.” But they’ve been lied to so many, many times over the years, and treated so very, very badly. Chinese moviegoers are like Chinese soccer fans or Chinese stock-market investors: arguably the best in the world, yet the object of their love is the worst in the world: the worst directors, the worst actors, the worst scripts, and the worst regulatory authorities. For so long they’ve waited for the chance (a chance like the one offered by “The Cow Comes”) to love Chinese cinema once more, to love it wholeheartedly. “Dear Mama,” they cry, [like the son in the 1988 Taiwanese tearjerker “My Beloved”] “Love me one last time!” before their hopes turn to ash.

[…] These days, most of the relationships we encounter in daily life are extractive, with the underlying logic being “I want something from you.” Platforms want your attention, businesses want your wallet, and social relationships want your “emotional engagement.” Even when you’re watching a piece of content online, there’s a whole algorithmic system behind the scenes, running calculations on you. A genuine relationship in which “I don’t want anything from you, you don’t want anything from me, and we both just feel good about it” has become a rare commodity, indeed. That’s why a phenomenon like “The Cow Comes” feels so precious.

[…] I suspect that another reason people like “The Cow Comes” is that it doesn’t try to lecture its audience or force-feed them values, and it isn’t tasked with the responsibility of “disseminating culture.”

[…] You could call this a peasant uprising, or a win for the underdog. It tells us that the script can be rewritten, and the nonsensical shattered. It reminds us that unreasonable restrictions aren’t set in stone, that privilege can be mocked, and that those “sacred cows” aren’t really so sacrosanct after all. [Chinese]

I’m going to be bold for a minute, and address this. Investigative reporter Li Wei’ao has written about two incidents in the last few months of officials assaulting women at banquets.

There’s already been media reporting on the first case, so there are tracks to follow.

I think they’re still trying to work out the right phrasing on the second case, because I haven’t been able to find an official notice.

Someone online asked why the media isn’t investigating and reporting on it.

Great question. Don’t ask it again. Nowadays, in cases like this, if local authorities haven’t issued an official notice of their own accord, any outlet that tries to report on it will basically just be kicked around like a football. Even central state media will get snapped at: "Which paper are you from? Why don’t you report on something positive?"

So in that second case, the only information that can currently be found on Deputy District Head Yu Tingdong is that his "biography was removed from the official government website," and it’s impossible to ferret out anything about his current position.

Jinan Times put out a piece earlier, but it’s gone now.

There’s not much to say about Deng Fuguo, [the accused] from the first case. I read about it a while ago in a Caixin report, which said a banquet had been arranged, and then dot, dot, dot …

As for what will happen next, whether there will be an official notice and how much information it will contain—all that depends on their whim. What I want to write about today is the six characters Li Wei’ao closed with: "Why does this keep happening?"

I’ve been thinking about the psychological mechanisms of power: what I’d call "expansive power" and "contractive power."

Think of it as a kind of ecosystem in which the subordination of power varies from place to place.

In some places, when a person gains power, it’s "spoils of war." It’s a means of subjugating others: "I’m powerful now; you all have to do as I say." And if you don’t, there’s violence—coercion to obey.

Then there are other places where, when someone gains power, their first thought is trepidation: "Everyone’s watching, it’s unnerving." So the person is cautious and restrained, not wanting to give people anything that could be turned against them. In other words, power is like a hot potato.

In the first case, power is expansive; in the second, it is constrained.

Imagine, you become an official today. Would you dare assault a woman at the banquet table tomorrow?

Ordinary people will think, "Absolutely not." But stay in that role for a while, and it seems less of a big deal, and you might start to entertain the thought. Because you’ve started to expand, and after your daily practice of expansion you feel, when you meet refusal, that this is a challenge. Then you expand the boundaries of your power, showing others, "I can assault you, and there’s nothing you can do about it."

As Montesquieu wrote: "Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go." [Source]

The point I want to make is that many people denounce this as "lechery." But at their core, these cases have nothing to do with sexual appetite, and if we keep looking at it in those terms, then things will only get worse in the shadows. Each time a case is discovered, it will just be like spotting a single cockroach.

Things like official banquets are actually a theater of power in microcosm. How can it be a simple matter of dining, when even the sequence of toasts reflects an intricate power heirarchy? And some of the people there are just supporting players, or even props.

I think the differences in what stands above power can be categorized into three tiers:

The lowest tier is expansive power. Examples omitted.

Second tier is contractive power. Singapore’s "high public salaries to foster integrity" are one example: they give officials high pay, but with zero-tolerance accountability. A corrupt minister isn’t just risking his pension: absolute disgrace is at stake.

It’s a bit like loan collateral. Officials put their property, dignity, freedom etc. up as collateral: there are no "spoils of conquest." So even a box of chocolates received as a gift has to be reported, and they’re constantly on edge, because the cost of holding power is high.

The top tier is flattened power. I think this is the best kind, but even some of the most established developed countries can’t pull it off. Only a few small countries in northern Europe have hints of it, with "power" stripped of its halo. For example, prime ministers have no chauffered vehicle or security detail, but regularly commute to work by bike. Power doesn’t contract or expand—it’s been "disenchanted."

But this is the most difficult, because it doesn’t just rely on institutions: these must be matched with moral self-discipline. As we all know, that kind of moral character is an aberration.

So that’s what I think. Don’t curse lechery. When power expands into monstrous forms at the banquet table, refusal is interpreted as "provocation," and oversight must always wait for the official notice, then the problem isn’t someone’s inability to control his lower half, it’s our fundamental lack of an iron cage strong enough to keep power contained. So it expanded. [Chinese]

While playing the popular role of “mad monk” Ji Gong in a theatrical performance in Wuhan earlier this month, Guo improvised some new lyrics to “Playing My Beloved Pipa,” a tune best known for its inclusion as a musical interlude in the 1956 revolutionary film “Railway Guerrilla” (Chinese title: 铁道游击队, Tiědào Yóujīduì). Guo changed the line "All is quiet on Weishan Lake" to "All is quiet in the Forbidden City," and played the scene for laughs, adding a bit of gibberish (妈咪妈咪哄, māmi māmi hōng) that is a comedic mangling of the Buddhist mantra “Om mani padme hum.”

Following a complaint from an unknown member of the public who accused Guo of “distorting” and “vulgarizing” a revolutionary classic, the Wuhan Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism announced that it was investigating Guo and the Qilin Opera Society, a group he cofounded, for violating regulations by performing content that had not been submitted for prior approval. Guo, arguably China’s most famous comedian, has been accused of overstepping red lines before: in late 2025, he was reportedly called in for a scolding by the Beijing Xicheng District Bureau of Culture and Tourism for his crosstalk routine "Great Skill, Little Courage," which made unflattering allusions to state-affiliated theatrical troupes.

The online reaction to this latest investigation into Guo Degang was withering. Many Chinese netizens characterized the investigation as a politically motivated overreaction, a harbinger of China’s shrinking cultural space, and a throwback to Cultural Revolution-era persecutions of performers, writers, musicians, and other creators. One commenter repeated a quote attributed to Guo to describe the political pressure and betrayal he experienced during a 2010 “anti-vulgarity” campaign: “Those who wrong you understand even better than you just how wronged you are.” Another alluded to a joke that got comedian House (Li Haoshi) banned back in 2023.

CDT editors have archived eleven articles, five of which were later censored, about the controversy over Guo’s performance and subsequent investigation, as well as a compilation of comments from Weibo and X criticizing the investigation into Guo Degang, a selection of which are translated below:

你永远不懂的流年: What era are we in, anyway? They’re being way too sensitive.

KingC天: He “distorted” the lyrics? That’s a bit much.

严小猥c: Sure, let’s stick to model operas from now on, you can’t go wrong with those.

自来火wx: It was just some random song in a movie. Elevating it to a major political offense is pathetic.

王胖子大明白: The entertainment space keeps shrinking.

毛豆蔻800: “Those who wrong you understand even better than you just how wronged you are.”

村口的蓝猫: “The Forbidden City is silent” — isn’t that true? The Qing was China’s last feudal dynasty.

元帅V587: We’re still doing this sort of persecution?

小花大咖秀: Hard to believe this is happening in 2026 …

ge0sn0w: When the body politic is all festering sores, wherever you poke it, it’s going to hurt.

qSMwoZXfW1y64WW: From now on, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala can just be 20 different performers singing the same national anthem.

HLCtoC: This outdoes the Qing Dynasty’s literary inquisition.

cloud_bingo: The Cultural Revolution never ended.

Ktan4A: Two dogs on a leash: one’s named “Fight to Win” and the other’s “Exemplary Conduct.” [A reference to a joke riffing on two PLA slogans that got comedian Li Haoshi banned back in 2023.]

XPD_Schenn83: The moment he sang those words “Forbidden City,” you knew exactly who was going to get pissed off behind the scenes. [Chinese]

One of the five deleted pieces in CDT’s archive about Guo’s latest tussle with cultural censors comes from WeChat account I Come From the Next Life. In “Might I Meekly Say a Few Words in Guo Degang’s Defense?" author Fan Dang describes the chilling effect that such comedy crackdowns have on all forms of self-expression. The author’s intentional use of trepidatious language and textual attempts to dodge platform censorship (for example, writing "sensitive word" as "敏g词," rather than the typical "敏感词," mǐngǎn cí) vividly illustrate how exacting and exhausting self-censorship has become. A portion of Fan’s essay is translated below:

I’m honestly not trying to make excuses for Guo Degang, or to show any disrespect toward our history or the forebears represented in these "red" works. I just … can’t help feeling that if a comedian cracking some harmless little joke onstage can escalate into a formal investigation, doesn’t that mean that the space for all of us ordinary people—the space to talk, chat, or joke around—is just going to keep getting narrower, too?

Nowadays before I post anything to my WeChat Moments, I have to draft it, read and reread it, delete any word that could possibly be misinterpreted, and even agonize over which stickers or emojis I use, just in case they convey some unintended meaning. After all that, and only after running it through a "sensitive-word" checking tool, do I finally dare to hit “send.” When I’m out eating with friends and the conversation touches on anything even slightly sensitive, I find myself glancing around and lowering my voice, like I’m some underground Party operative meeting a secret contact.

I always think that when it comes to culture, there’s got to be some room for harmless joking around, otherwise the bow is strung too tightly—ready to snap at the slightest touch.

By this point, I’ve already gone back and revised this piece at least seven times. I’ve double-checked every sentence, changed the punctuation more than a few times, and even closed and reopened the document on three separate occasions, out of fear that some line might come out wrong. If there’s anything inappropriate, I’ll fix it right away, even delete the whole thing if I have to. I’m about as ordinary a person as they come, and today it took me nearly two hours to work up the nerve to finally hit "send" and timidly speak a few honest words I’d been sitting on for a long time. That’s all I meant to say, truly.

Truly. [Chinese]

Nevertheless, the notice that has replaced it online says that "this content cannot be viewed due to rule violations. Following relevant complaints, it was found to violate the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China." Automated keyword scanning may also have played a role: see other recent translations for more on collateral damage from this approach, and efforts by users to evade it.

Now that Zhengyangmen is open to the public, I felt compelled to make the obligatory visit to Tiananmen Square again.

I was already a bit apprehensive about the security checks after my parents’ trip to Beijing last year, when they’d decided to visit Mao’s mausoleum.

This time happened to coincide with the peak of the summer break. The heat was stifling, and it seemed like things would be even worse than before.

My goal, Zhengyangmen, is by Exit A of Qianmen Station on Line 2, but unfortunately, as I only realised later when I was trying to leave, that’s a one-way exit.

So after leaving through Exit C, I couldn’t just go straight across the road; I had to cross twice, through two separate underpasses.

This involves one ID-card swipe, and a security check.

They had to look through my bag at the security check, so I quickly got my things out. That day, that meant a book, a notebook for collecting tourist stamps and, because it had been raining a lot, an umbrella. That was about it.

I was extremely cooperative, hoping they’d finish up and let me through as quickly as possible, and of course that’s what happened.

I could see Zhengyangmen ahead of me on the right and, wanting to get inside quickly, I rushed forward without thinking.

The security checker must have sensed my impatience, because they drawled said, "No point in hurrying, there’s more security up ahead."

With hindsight, that first security check was just a canapé before the banquet.

As I crossed the intersection of Qianmen West and East Avenues and turned north onto West Guangchang Road, the crowds became denser.

At this point, Zhengyangmen was directly to my east. I was about to start lining up in that direction when I was courteously informed that that was the line for the group security check, and I needed to keep going.

So I kept heading north. The crowd had slowed to a crawl, and started to divide again into streams: those with bags, and without.

Those without bags moved on a bit quicker, while those of us with bags continued to wait.

By now, the sun was beating down on us mercilessly, and a lot of people were using parasols. Some were chatting about other places they’d visited over the past few days.

The Numismatic Museum was to the left, the building a fairly impressive sight from that angle. To the right was the mausoleum, looking solemn and dignified as always.

By then, we’d been kept waiting so long and had grown so impatient that it was hard to appreciate the sights.

The kids in the crowd started to get rowdy, and were variously consoled or scolded by the adults, who were suffering every bit as much as the little ones.

Kids are just more straightforward about voicing their annoyance.

The whole security line had stopped, and we had no idea what was going on up ahead.

I didn’t realize how stringent the security checks were until I actually experienced it myself. It’s even stricter than at the airport.

There are two stages to the personal security check. In the first, they pass a handheld sensor wand over your whole body and pat down your pockets, so I had to take off my sun jacket and also remove my keys, cellphone, etc. from my pockets.

I even had to take my phone out of its case so the inspector could take a look.

When you get to the second stage, an inspector of the same gender as you pats down your whole body wearing disposable gloves, and lifts the hem of your top to check for concealed items around your waist.

They poked and prodded at my shoes for a while, but fortunately they didn’t make me take them off.

Once the personal check was over, it was time for the bag inspection, and you had to take out all the contents. They looked through every page in my book, but didn’t say anything in the end.

The person inspecting the group next to me told them they couldn’t take photos with a book and certain other item—I don’t know what kind of book it was.

One reason things moved slowly was that the police were involved through the whole process: if one of the staff wasn’t sure about something, they’d call the police over, which led to more waiting.

In short, after layer after layer of checks, I got through and left the guardhouse. When I looked round, I realized there were very few others coming out, and an endless line of people still waiting.

I don’t know whether I just turned up at the busiest time, but I’d avoid wandering onto the Square without a particular reason, especially in summer. If you must go, stow your bags elsewhere beforehand.

Having said that, you should travel while you can. I miss the old days when you didn’t have to book in advance. [Chinese]

In contrast with this post’s deletion, another recently archived article takes a much more critical stance on security checks, but currently remains online. At the WeChat account 白马狗熊 Bái Mǎ Gǒuxióng ("White Horse Black Bear"), Song Jinbo notes tightening security checks at subway stations in many Chinese cities, and highlights claims that they are actually detrimental to public safety, causing potentially dangerous bottlenecks. Moreover, he expresses concern that well over 100,000 young Chinese may be wasting key years in their early 20s performing labor of dubious value, pointedly contrasting this with Marx’s calls for people’s "all-round development" and Xi’s calls for the young to "cherish the springtime of their lives" and strive for self-improvement in the national interest. Song posits that the checks endure because of financial interests in what has become a multi-billion-yuan industry, and because officials are reluctant to ever remove security measures in case subsequent events should make that look reckless, wrecking their careers. Meanwhile, taxpayers who objected to the cost, inconvenience, and ineffectiveness of the security checks would have no way to exert effective pressure against them. Song opens the piece with a 2024 case in which 14 fraud victims reportedly worked in non-existent outsourced roles on the Shanghai Metro for months, while their unauthorized presence went unnoticed. "A system that can’t even tell fake workers apart from real ones requires you every day to put your water bottle through security and your tote bag through a scanner. Consummate artistry."

Wang Hong (王虹, Wáng Hóng), age 35, was born and raised in Guilin, Guangxi province. After graduating from Peking University, she earned advanced degrees in engineering (École Polytechnique) and mathematics (Paris-Sud) in France, and her doctorate in mathematics from MIT. Now a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Wang was awarded the Fields Medal for her contributions to harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, and major advances on a number of mathematical conundrums, including her work on the three-dimensional “Kakeya conjecture” with collaborator Joshua Zahl (University of British Columbia). Wang is the first Chinese woman—and only the third woman overall—to win in the award’s 90-year history.

Deng Yu (邓煜, Dèng Yù), 37, was born in Kaifeng, Henan province, and raised in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. After two years at Peking University, he transferred to MIT for his undergraduate work, and later earned a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton. Currently a professor at the University of Chicago, Deng received the Fields Medal for his work in partial differential equations and his breakthrough on "Hilbert’s sixth problem," with University of Michigan collaborators Zaher Hani and Ma Xiao (Xiao Ma, in English).

CDT editors have archived over a dozen articles on various topics related to the Fields Medal winners. One popular topic concerned how much credit is due to Peking University (PKU), which proudly trumpeted the news of alums Wang and Deng winning the prestigious prize by putting up festive banners and projecting congratulatory messages onto the campus’ famed Boya Pagoda. PKU’s official WeChat account also republished an interview with Deng Yu, conducted by the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research (BICMR), but internet users quickly noticed that PKU’s version of the interview had been selectively edited, with numerous alterations and a question about overseas study deleted entirely. CDT Chinese editors compiled a side-by-side comparison of the original interview and PKU’s selectively edited text.

Congratulatory messages projected onto Peking University’s famed Boya Pagoda read: “Congratulations to Wang Hong and Deng Yu!” and “Congratulations to Chinese mathematics!”

Perhaps the most viral topic was a video interview in which Wang confided that she “felt a little discouraged” during her time at Peking University. The English word “discouraged” soon became a trending hashtag on Weibo, but was later censored, although some related content referencing Wang’s use of “discouraged” could still be viewed. Many Chinese social media users shared their own experiences of feeling thwarted by what they described as an overly hierarchical and inflexible academic system, and debated whether the two Fields Medal winners would have chalked up the same achievements had they remained in China. Wang’s comment clearly resonated with many Chinese netizens, and CDT has archived several articles on the subject. A piece from WeChat account Her Narrative, “Thank You, Wang Hong, for Saying the Word ‘Discouraged,’” describes Wang’s early frustrations and circuitous academic path, highlights the importance of her graduate studies in France and the U.S. and finding her “true mentors,” and encourages readers to live life at their own pace and not to lose confidence. In “Why We All Understood What Wang Hong Meant by ‘Discouraged,’” from WeChat account Plucking a Bashful Moon, the author discusses growing up in China and having their shortcomings frequently pointed out by teachers and parents, and contrasts this with what they view as a more supportive and positive culture of encouragement in Italy, where the author has spent some time.

In a video interview, Fields Medalist Wang Hong described her time studying Earth Sciences at Peking University, “I felt a little discouraged.”

In connection with this discussion of “educational trauma,” some suggested using the term “school of origin” (原生学校, yuánshēng xuéxiào) to refer to PKU’s complex relationship with alumni such as Wang and Deng. “School of origin” derives from "family of origin" (原生家庭, yuánshēng jiātíng), a term used in psychology to refer to the family—and family trauma—one was born into. One Chinese-language comment on Threads that received over 5,000 likes said that in the case of Wang and Deng, “PKU has played the role of their ‘school of origin.’” Other users agreed, with one humorously complaining, “Look at my family of origin, school of origin, and country of origin … I’m totally screwed.”

In an archived piece from WeChat account History Rhymes, “Wang Hong and Deng Yu Won the Fields Medal, But How Much Credit Does Peking University Really Deserve?” current affairs blogger Xu Peng discusses this question in light of the academic histories of the two mathematicians, both of whom attended PKU but whose advanced degrees and subsequent academic achievements were earned abroad. In one widely-shared quote, Xu likens their relationship with their Chinese alma mater to that between Yang Guo, the fictional protagonist of Jin Yong’s wuxia novel “The Return of the Condor Heroes,” and the Quanzhen martial arts sect. In Xu’s example, the Quanzhen Sect served as Yang Guo’s “school of origin,” the place where he spent an unhappy and unproductive tutelage under a master who resented him. A short excerpt from Xu’s article follows:

The recent news that two Chinese mathematicians have won the Fields Medal has sparked a frenzy online and given our nation’s “triumphalists” yet another reason to cheer.

Many say that the awards won by Wang Hong and Deng Yu, both Chinese, are a milestone for China. Chinese media has also emphasized that Wang Hong and Deng Yu are both alumni of Peking University.

[…] But how much did their success really have to do with Peking University? There’s certainly some connection there, but the university likely played a minor role.

You could call it the first step on their mathematical path. Without that first step, they might not have reached the pinnacle of their profession.

It feels a bit like Yang Guo’s relationship with the Quanzhen Sect.

If they hadn’t gone abroad, and had conducted their mathematical research in China, would they still have won the Fields Medal?

[…] They are the first two Chinese nationals to win that prize, and this goes to prove that Chinese people are capable of such an achievement.

But as the saying goes: "Orange trees grown south of the River Huai yield sweet fruit, while those north of the river bear bitter fruit.” Even the best seedlings require good soil if they’re to produce a bountiful harvest. [Chinese]

CHINA – PINGYAO, by Pierre Doyen (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)