CC, the Phone Recycler, and Xi Jinping's Daughter

In August of this year, Bilibili influencer "CC Recycling Phones" released a video about visiting the home of Delta Force game streamer Wang Haoyu to recycle hardware, which included two graphics cards: an RTX 5090 and an RTX 5080. In the video, her quoted prices were 13,500 and 6,000 respectively. She is a full-time door-to-door recycling agent for Zhuanzhuan, which is her daily job. Like most influencers, posting videos gives her an extra source of income and brings in more business. By that time, she had already posted hundreds of similar videos and had over 900,000 followers on Bilibili. She probably thought this video would be just like the previous ones, generating some views and gaining a few followers.

Things did not turn out that way. As soon as the video went live, the bullet comments and comment sections started doing the math: a newly released 5090 had a recycling price of only 13,500? At that time, the 5090 in Huaqiangbei had already been scalped up to around 30,000, and some people even dug up secondhand 4090s listed on the platform itself for nearly 20,000. Voices accusing her of "undercutting" and "exploiting ordinary people" grew louder and louder. Within a day, the platform's valuation of this card underwent a noticeable adjustment, which only seemed to confirm the suspicions.

To be honest, I am not surprised by this kind of thing. I have used secondhand platforms to recycle items myself, doing so purely for convenience and speed, and I knew very well before placing the order: this cut had to be taken. Zhuanzhuan is like that, and those secondhand car platforms are like that too. With companies blasting advertisements everywhere every day, if they don't make a profit from every single order, who is going to pay for these ad fees? It's just that this time, the onlookers refused to accept this cut, and this particular cut happened to fall on the most covetable graphics card around.

Faced with the backlash, she hurriedly came out to explain: the video was filmed in July, when the graphics card market hadn't surged yet, and according to the market price at that time, the quote wasn't outrageous; post-production editing dragged on until August before it was released, and prices had jumped significantly during that month, making the quote look mismatched.

The explanation failed to calm things down; instead, it was like adding fuel to the fire. Starting on August 18, pornographic comics began appearing in her comment section; by mid-September, someone superimposed nude photos of other women onto her, followed by AI-generated images and spliced videos. Her home address, phone number, and ID card information were also posted online. On September 17, with the assistance of her company's legal team, she gathered evidence and reported the case to the police, and the police accepted the filing. On September 30, she posted a video titled "Being Slandered with Pornographic Rumors for 2 Months, I Called the Police," which gained over three million views and more than 10,000 comments within a few days. To this day, I have not seen any further updates from the police.

Why could a recycling quote make so many people angry to this extent?

However, I must admit that this fire did not come from nowhere. The whole world is scrambling for AI computing power, and it is not just the computing cards in data centers that are being snatched up, but also VRAM and storage; gaming graphics cards are rising in price along with them. In early August, the price of a 5090 in Huaqiangbei rose from around 20,000 to around 35,000. Merchants said they were changing prices every day, and stock had to be prioritized for the AI sector. Chinese gamers have an extra layer of pressure on their heads: from the ban on A100 and H100 in 2022, to the inclusion of the gaming card 4090 in export controls to China in 2023, NVIDIA had to create a separate 4090D for China with its performance cut; by the 5090 generation, what could be legally purchased was the same castrated 5090D, and later the 5090D V2 with even more VRAM cut was released. In May of this year, even this card was blocked by Chinese customs. The U.S. locks the best cards, and Beijing blocks the weakened ones; ordinary gamers have no path on either side. This wall is even extending to the U.S. mainland; in early October, a customer said that to buy a computer equipped with a 5090 at a Micro Center in California, they had to show a photo ID and sign a guarantee that it was "prohibited for export, no exceptions."

I did a rough calculation. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the average annual salary for private sector units in urban areas in 2025 was over 71,000 yuan. Roughly calculating based on 2,000 working hours a year, that is 36 yuan per hour. A 35,000-yuan 5090 requires nearly 1,000 hours of work, almost half a year's pre-tax salary. The average hourly wage in the U.S. private sector is $37.81; based on the suggested retail price, it takes just over 50 hours. For the same card, the labor time a Chinese person has to pay is several times that of an American, and what they get is often still a weakened version. And this is based on official Chinese income data; Chinese people naturally know how much water is in those figures. If we look at the wages seen in those "hourly wage purchasing power challenge" videos, such as the sanitation worker in Heze, Shandong, who makes 600 yuan a month with no days off, the elderly man sweeping the streets would have to work for nearly five years without eating or drinking to buy this card. A few years ago, the 4090 was called a "faith card" by gamers, and one could grit their teeth and afford it; today's 5090 is no longer a piece of gaming equipment that a young person can acquire by saving for a few months.

In my view, the root of this calculation lies in the foreign policy line Xi Jinping has taken over these years. Wolf warrior diplomacy and the narrative of "the East is rising and the West is declining" have resulted in a posture that grows harder every year, which in turn has led to a rare consensus among both U.S. parties and chip controls that tighten with every round. The U.S. certainly has its own agenda, but it is hard to expect a country that declares every day that its rival is in decline and treats the West as an enemy to show leniency on the most critical technologies. "The East is rising and the West is declining" talks about winning, but for ordinary people, it boils down to a graphics card they cannot afford and cannot buy.

Therefore, the price quoted in that video hit a sore spot for many people: a card they cannot afford even by gritting their teeth is only worth 13,500 in the eyes of a recycler. The overwhelming number of AI-generated fake images and spliced videos perhaps just goes to show how intense this anger is. Those who spend time making these things and those most frustrated by the rising prices of graphics cards are likely the same group: young men who buy graphics cards, play games, and use AI.

But there is one thing I have never been able to figure out. Graphics cards have been expensive for two years, while housing prices have been rising for decades. A house swallows the savings of two or three generations of a family; young people carry 30-year mortgages, and in recent years, owners of unfinished buildings have had to pay mortgages while still paying rent. These costs are much larger and more painful than a graphics card. Why haven't we seen so many people this angry? Why doesn't anyone make AI-generated pornographic images of the local governments that speculate on housing prices, the finance departments that sell land, and Xi Jinping who promotes "the East is rising and the West is declining"? Why does no one expose the home addresses of those who set the rules that "social security must be paid based on 6,000 yuan even if the monthly salary is 3,000"?

Actually, everyone knows the answer in their hearts. If you shout at power, you will have your posts deleted, be summoned for a talk, or be invited for "tea"; shouting is useless. If you target a young, defenseless female recycler with no background, you pay no price and can even harvest a circle of likes. Keeping silent before the powerful while using every possible means against a weak woman—this is not anger; it is bullying the weak and fearing the strong. They dare not utter a single word against the hand that truly makes them unable to afford cards or houses; the only person they can pin to the ground and trample is a worker who quotes prices for a platform.

Likewise, as someone's daughter, when Xi Mingze's photo was published, they could just find someone to sentence to fourteen years in prison. Those socialist "oxen and horses" in the hourly wage purchasing power challenge will also never consider buying a 5090 graphics card. When the waves of great power competition crash down, they only wet a small corner. CC does not have a father named Xi Jinping, so she became a scapegoat. She is not carrying her own burden, but the burden of this market, this era, and is even carrying the burden for Xi Jinping. One should be angry, and one must be angry. When a graphics card exposes the scam of our hourly wage purchasing power, not being angry is numbness. But if anger is directed at the wrong target, rights defense will be turned into mutual harm.