From street strategists to establishment pundits

China’s “world affairs fandom” is a curious subculture. It has grown in an information environment shaped by many forces at once: attention-driven platforms, uneven media literacy, and a speech market where red lines are sensed more often than spelt out, nudging participants towards euphemism and hint. Meanwhile, much of the global conversation sits behind a firewall, leaving a peculiarly domestic version of “the world” to circulate—one that rewards second-hand certainty more than first-hand knowledge.

From this ecosystem emerge the “street strategists” and their higher-end cousins: some shouting in big-font slogans for the mass market, others offering a more polished variant for lecture halls and conference rooms. Either way, the job is the same: boil the world down into something brutally simple and eerily conspiratorial.

And in that setting, moderation tends to be a liability. The loudest voices are not merely amplified by algorithms; they are often spared the swift correction that greets less convenient kinds of speech. With only selective braking by platforms and regulators (sometimes in the name of accuracy), the scene starts to seal itself off, until its internal feedback loop supplies all the coherence it needs. In-jokes become catchphrases; catchphrases harden into doctrine; doctrine turns into badges of belonging, and then into habits of feeling.

Soon, people are no longer arguing with the world so much as with one another, inside a closed loop of their own making. The talk turns self-referential; outrage is recycled, intensified, and taken as evidence. The result is a discourse complete with its own worldview, folklore, and language, shaped as much by self-imposed insularity as by official gatekeeping.

The recent (temporary?) ban of Lu Kewen, a mega-influencer of the “patriotic” persuasion, has triggered revealing reactions from within this stratified, closed ecosystem. Many cheered. Some, like Song Xi 宋晰, author of the first piece translated below, could not resist a little self-congratulation: Lu, they insisted, merely caters to the less educated; the white-collar set in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou would never fall for it. The implication was reassuring. The problem, in this telling, lives somewhere else: in factory dorms, in county-town internet cafés, not in Starbucks.

The second essay by Guang Buyu 关不羽, a freelance journalist, offers a sharp correction. True, the mass version shouts. But the “premium” version isn’t an antidote—it just speaks more softly and dresses itself up with a preamble: Anglo-Saxon blocs, Jewish conspiracy, Freemasons as a kind of intellectual ...