Why circumventing the Great Firewall Can't Cure Little Pinks? Closed Campuses Circle Zero-Cost Loyalty Signalling, A Poor Student Buying 10-Yuan Coffee Monitored for 37 Days and Reported, Rich Second-Generation Students Defending the CCP Out of Fear of Questioning Their Family's Wealth Origins, The Iron Fist Waking People Only When It Hits Them, The Dangerous Vacuum After Waking Up! Switching from Pro-CCP to Anti-CCP Doesn't Mean You're Still a Little Pink

This episode delves into how the Little Pinks group is formed, analyzing how closed campuses, collective settings, and symbolic violence construct the psychological architecture of the Little Pinks. The host points out that simply relying on open information or circumventing the Great Firewall cannot cure the Little Pinks; it requires the arrival of the iron fist, the shattering of the illusion of being a vested interest, and the loosening of collective settings. At the same time, the program also examines the dangerous vacuum period after they stop being Little Pinks, emphasizing the importance of restoring individual subjectivity.

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Observe things as they are, reject fragmented cognition. Recently, I chatted with a friend about a very interesting topic. I think this topic is very worthy of an episode: how did this thing called Little Pinks come about? What is the mainstream opinion? It's that Little Pinks are just brainwashed, and feeding them more truth will cure them. But I don't see it that way. I think the word "brainwashing" both overestimates the CCP's propaganda department and underestimates the CCP's machine. Little Pinks are not fed by one stupid slogan after another, but what are they? It is an entire psychological building, with a foundation, load-bearing walls, and property management. The difficulty of tearing it down is actually the same as tearing down a building; the difficulty is very high. But because the foundation is very brittle, the collapses are all self-inflicted. In fact, this thing called Little Pinks relies on two very important conditions: one is collective fantasy, and the other is regarding oneself as a vested interest class. In fact, if we look at the awakening process of the Little Pinks, we can see the dependency chain of these two things. Let's first talk about how the average Little Pink wakes up. It's the switch of the iron fist. What does it control? It's whether the hard costs of the system have really hit them personally. Like the neighborhood committee sealing your building, the police (Public Security) fining you, or overturning your stall when you are doing small business, or forced demolition, these all count. When this set of work hasn't fallen on the Little Pinks themselves, they can shout those CCP slogans very fluently, and even explain away those bad news that simply cannot be whitewashed as what? The growing pains of development, especially from the ruler's perspective, right? Or is it smearing by external forces? Once the CCP's rhetoric falls on the Little Pinks themselves, the CCP's discourse makes it okay for others to hurt, but when they themselves feel the pain, it can no longer be covered up. The other is collective fantasy, which is whether everyone is trapped in a closed collective space. For example, like a closed-management school, or a state-owned collective factory, this condition plus what? Plus the information pruned by algorithms.

I collectively refer to these types of spaces as collective fields. When you are inside this field, you are surrounded entirely by other classmates, which creates a specific situation. What kind of situation? It is that at this point, the cost for you to pledge loyalty is zero, but the price for you to go against the grain is very real—you get ostracized, and you might even be expelled by the school. Once a person leaves this field and nobody is watching them anymore, they conversely have to answer the question of what they themselves actually believe. The combination of these two switches cuts out four types of people. Let us see if the whole profile matches up, shall we? The first type of Little Pinks are those whose circles are closed and the iron fist has not yet struck down. This grid is like a greenhouse layer. Standard campus Little Pinks are those who fight within this system; they neither pay taxes, nor pay off mortgages, nor fight labor lawsuits. Such a field combined with zero social iron fists easily produces this demographic. Therefore, we see a very amusing phenomenon: from junior high school to senior high school and then to university, the lower the closure, the content of that Pink ideology is... well, the lower it gets. What is the second type of Pink like? It is that the circle is closed, but the iron fist has also arrived. Many grassroots young people within the system in China are the typical example of this. However, a breach has already been generated here. What is the profile of this crowd? It is that during the day in their work units they organize some bullshit political study sessions, which they actually find endlessly annoying. Yet their salary, job security (bianzhi), and future prospects are all tied up inside this circle, and they cannot run away from their bianzhi either. Their behavioral traits are also very obvious: they say one thing in public settings, but at night when they return home they fucking curse another, keeping two sets of accounts separately where neither touches the other. Many civil servants in my family have this exact virtue. The third type of Pink is that particularly bizarre category where the circle has opened up, but the iron fist cannot reach them either—kind of like a group of people covered by a glass dome, like those second-generation rich kids or overseas students. Many of them have families with money or the ability to block the iron fist outside of this dome. We will discuss this paradox separately later. The final type is one where the circle has opened up, and the iron fist has also caught up with them. This grid is the only breach. Pinks in this grid hurt the most, but it is also where true subjectivity can grow out.

Someone might say, isn't this just a matter of information? Just tear down the Great Firewall, and the illness will be cured. I think this statement is not accurate enough. Take Taiwan, for example; it is also an information-open society, right? Aren't there still a group of people yearning for life on the other side? If awakening equaled reading more information, overseas students outside the Great Firewall would have long since collectively de-fanned. Furthermore, intense information blockades can explain all fanaticism. Yet in reality, neither end matches up: a large batch of overseas students still believe the completely logical-free narrative of the Chinese Communist Party under conditions where information can be viewed at will. On the side inside the Great Firewall, there are also extremes—a large batch of people who have never stably circumvented the Great Firewall. Those inside the Great Firewall are fed all that fucking bullshit CCP rhetoric, yet they do not believe a single punctuation mark of it. Therefore, my judgment is that having information alone is not enough. For a person to truly wake up, two things must happen simultaneously: one is that the iron fist genuinely strikes them or their own family members, or what? The money or power within the family is something they cannot block no matter how hard they try. What is the other thing? It is that the closed field in their brain is broken, and the voices of old classmates or old friends and relatives from the past can no longer control them at all. What kind of thing is this voice? We will chat about it specially later.

Now that we have finished with the foundation, let us look at the load-bearing wall. There is a sociologist in the United States named Erving Goffman, who squatted in a psychiatric hospital for a year doing fieldwork and then wrote a book called Asylums. In his book, he distilled a concept called total institutions. What does it refer to? It refers to a place that packs your sleeping, eating, and working all into an authoritative timetable, and then builds a wall between you and the outside world. This kind of place is called a total institution—prison-style, military-camp-style, psychiatric hospitals are too, and those schools in China are as well. Goffman said the very first thing such an institution starts doing is to completely destroy your original self—for example, taking away your name, confiscating your clothes, including your time and any of your private spaces, taking everything completely away, and then issuing you an institution-designated identity and rhythm. Now, if you take this mold and apply it to China's closed campuses: space-wise, space traps you to death; time-wise, time schedules you to death; companions-wise, companions fucking stare you to death. Wasn't there a poor student just a couple of days ago who was reported just for buying a cup of coffee costing less than 10 yuan every day? All for that little bit of financial aid! The person who reported them was truly fucking awesome, continuously staking them out for thirty-seven days. And information-wise, information locks you down to death too. A Chinese student is extremely miserable: around six-thirty in the morning, probably not even seven o'clock, they have to appear on the playground to clock in, and then fucking run frantically around the track. Starting at seven-thirty you start classes, then write test papers all day long, and in the evening you still have evening self-study. At ten-thirty you still have dorm inspections, lights out, power cut, and internet cutoff.

In the 1950s, American psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments on line segments. He had a room full of people judge which two line segments were the same length, but everyone else in the room was a plant he had arranged. For instance, if the subject said one thing, the plants would collectively say it was wrong. As a result, many people, despite clearly seeing that the answer was incorrect, still followed the crowd and repeated the wrong answer. This experiment has since been replicated many times around the world, and the conclusion is quite robust: people will indeed follow the crowd and tell lies; it is just that the number of people following the trend varies by location and era. The group known as Little Pinks publicly took shape around 2015. At that time, the core demographic was highly concentrated in the 18 to 24 age range, most of whom were students who had not yet entered society. Researchers analyzed the new followers of the Communist Youth League's Weibo account and found that users aged 18 to 24 accounted for more than half. Furthermore, the gender ratio was split right down the middle. This business now has a ready-made playbook, and who established this playbook? It was established by that Li Yi, the eighth. In January 2016, Li Yi's eighth organized a so-called expedition, where tens of thousands of young people formed groups to circumvent the Great Firewall and ran where? They ran to President Tsai Ing-wen's Facebook page to spam fucking memes. Then, in July of the same year, during the South China Sea arbitration, the Korea issue, and the 2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests, every round followed the same script: organizing a group of people, then launching an expedition. And what was the chain like? The Communist Youth League sets the tone, the platform's algorithm pushes it out, and the organizational cost can be said to be ridiculously low. Later, because the CCP adopted a 'mad dog' diplomacy route, these people's actions also fucking escalated accordingly. Things like the piano incident at the British airport, the incident at the Japanese restaurant 'Nishi-taigo', and what's that guy's name, Tietou? And that fucking idiot—they all escalated as the CCP government's actions escalated.

These things are actually quite counter-intuitive. For example, intuitively, the better your family background and the freer your information, the weaker your nationalism should be, right? However, if you look at some university or international student groups, on issues like Taiwan and Hong Kong, the voices loudly defending the CCP are not only present, but the proportion is not low, and the rhetoric is even more sophisticated. The Wall Street Journal has tracked several stories of former Little Pink international students who turned away from that path. What was their behavior before the turn? These people would debate human rights with classmates in overseas classrooms, and this issue would be debated for years. This is the third type I mentioned at the beginning—that is, the collective no longer has closure, and the 'iron fist' hasn't hit them, so how could they still become Little Pinks? It's because of this 'shield'. Let's look at how this shield works. When children from wealthy families deal with this regime, because of this shield acting as a filter, they mostly encounter the good side. For example, passports work, high-speed rail reaches their doorstep, and they can buy anything in malls. The CCP's narrative is still full of bullshit like 'the rise of a great power' every day. Who does the iron fist hit? It hits grassroots workers, like delivery drivers, those demanding unpaid wages, and people locked in urban villages. In any case, it's not these people paying the price. So, when these things reach their eyes, combined with the CCP's narrative, it turns into: 'This is a necessary cost, right? Growing pains, right? Isolated incidents, right?' At this moment, they have an illusion of being part of the vested interest class. Let's ask a deeper question: why do these people support this order so much? Think about it, where did their family's money come from? Wasn't it earned from this order? I don't want to say that all these people are children of corrupt officials or anything like that; that's not necessarily true, and there are plenty who earned their money through their own hard work. But once you project yourself into the class of vested interests, your entire perception of the matter becomes distorted, because this turns into what kind of perspective? For example, if you question this system, in their view, what is it? It's questioning their family, or questioning whether their family's money was obtained legitimately, or questioning whether they deserve their sense of superiority. So, whenever someone criticizes this system, these people jump higher than anyone else, just because of the illusion that they are part of the vested interest class. Perhaps it's not an illusion. If their parents really were corrupt, then you are indeed the vested interest class. This makes it so that when you criticize this system, they feel like you are criticizing their family.

However, this glass dome thing is not a perpetual motion machine, either. Wasn't that privileged class at the very top of the hierarchy? Doesn't the iron fist smash down on them at any moment, too? Which of those with family businesses that are still able to make money don't have to rely on connections with that Chinese government? Once the officials connected to this business run into trouble, the family's business will plummet. Like being unable to return home due to the Wuhan肺炎 epidemic, or not being allowed to leave to study abroad, whenever you run into this kind of thing, this dome cracks by itself. Once the dome cracks, this person will slide from the glass dome toward the breach. Why? Because the collective fantasy of being part of the privileged class inside their brain has been completely shattered. Around the time of the White Paper Movement in late October 2022, former Little Pinks who publicly turned away at overseas mourning rallies were not isolated incidents either. Harvard researchers interviewed a sample of Chinese international students, and about half of the respondents identified with the ideals of freedom and democracy, while one-third of this half admitted that they had supported the governing style of the Chinese Communist Party in their early years. So you see, the dome is not incapable of shattering; once it shatters, it hurts just the same, and they turn away just the same.

So everyone can see, what is a Little Pink? It is a process of being stripped of one's agency, or rather, not just Little Pinks—any group with strong collective control will produce this phenomenon, ahem, call it the pink phenomenon. There is a ready-made example in the United States: in the 1970s, there was a cult called the Peoples Temple, and the cult leader was named Jim Jones. It grew large in San Francisco in the 1970s, and later he moved more than 900 followers into the jungle, building Jonestown. People who went inside had their passports confiscated first, and then loudspeakers broadcasted his speeches every day. Cult members would even snitch on each other; anyone who wanted to run away was a traitor. When reporters outside reported this scandal, how did Jones explain it himself? His claim was that the CIA and imperialism were persecuting them. Think about it: isn't that phrase "foreign hostile forces" cut from the exact same cloth? Then, in 1978, a U.S. congressman went to investigate, and Jones directly had the congressman killed. Following that, more than 900 people died from drinking poison, and over 300 of them were children who had it forced down their throats. The leader is never wrong; the one that is always wrong is the outside world.

Putting this mindset into the brain of people from any country ends up with the same fate. Everyone remember, whenever there is this concept of a polarized collective, there isn't a single fucking good thing about it, not one exception. I am just going to put this right here. There is only one standard for polarization: look at how that collective prices two actions. One is the cost of exiting, and the other is the cost of criticizing. Look at the entire process of the Jones case: did he have any Great Firewall? Did he have the Publicity Department of the CCP Central Committee? Didn't he still manage to corral 900 Little Pinks for you? So this thing is related to the system, but the relationship is not the greatest; the greatest relationship is still with collective control and the loss of individual agency. Ahem, that has a much stronger connection. And all the educational actions of the Chinese Communist Party are a process of stripping away agency. Then what does stripping away agency grind away? Three most precious things. The very first one is that urge to ask "why." When we were in school, those of us who went to school in China all encountered this situation: once you asked the teacher a couple of extra questions, the teacher would be extremely annoyed, and the answers were also highly consistent and unified. The usual answer was, "Sigh, just remember it, the exams don't test 'why'! Ahem, that's just the way it is, practicing you.

For a dozen years, you stop asking. Another one is the ability to coexist with the absence of standard answers. When we went to school, all the questions since childhood had only one correct answer, ahem, there was only one standard answer. Science subjects aside, even fucking what emotion the author was expressing in a Chinese literature piece fucking had a standard answer. Two trees by my front door, one is a peach tree, the other is another peach tree, and it asks what the fuck Lu Xun was expressing. I know what the fuck he was expressing. Brother, I think back in the Republic of China era, the highest probability was that he was paid by the character for his manuscripts. I have no idea what emotion he was expressing. Under this framework of having a standard answer, if you encounter a matter without an answer, you panic. At this time, you will casually grab any old saying and start believing it. What is the most ruthless thing? It is unbinding your own pain from the rules. The classic phrasing is: "Everyone else can do this or that, how come only you can't?" If you can't afford a house, this set of rules blames your own lack of ability, ahem, making you unable to figure out who on earth is the one selling land. If you lose your job, this set of rules will say why other people have jobs while you don't, making you disengage from the reality of the job market. People have never learned since childhood to link pain with rules. Once you take a beating, these people in society who hold the fantasy of a privileged collective make you blame yourself, and even make you blame yourself for not working hard enough, or blame foreign hostile forces. Furthermore, under the speech environment in China, you can only look at these pieces of bullshit. But isn't whether these rules can be debated an even more profound question?

If you put all these elements back together, you can map out the path of how a person transforms from a Little Pink. This path is summarized from a large collection of real people and real stories: some turned after studying abroad, some lost their faith after the lockdowns, and others were beaten down by society after graduation and left feeling confused. All of these experiences are included here, and not everyone manages to walk this entire path completely. Some stop halfway, some jump back and forth, and some skip grades entirely. However, the starting point generally begins with completely believing the toxic rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At this stage, in the eyes of the Little Pinks, the country is without fault, the CCP is without fault, and following it brings light and direction. Anyone who dares to say a word of disagreement is labeled as hostile propaganda. To the system, a person at this stage is an asset. Look, you volunteer to create content and volunteer to march out, while the CCP doesn't have to spend a single fucking cent on your time or passion.

Then comes the fissure. It might be an unfair treatment, or witnessing their advisor fabricating data and embezzling research funds with their own eyes, or more directly, a policy landing squarely on their head.

There is an economist named Albert O. Hirschman who said that when an organization lets you down, you have three options: exit, voice, or loyalty. When the fissure first appears, the overwhelming majority of people still choose to stay and endure, and this stage is even more fragmented. How so? Many will try to drown out the disappointment with even louder loyalty, continuing to play the part in public, while the knot in their heart remains untied. Then, with high probability, they will also brainwash themselves, thinking, "Oh, it's just my own political consciousness that is lacking." Later on, the iron fist really strikes hard. For example, right now, the police (Public Security) arbitrarily hand out fines, or the lockdowns last for months, cutting off your income, and the original-brand medicines you need for medical treatment are no longer available. Then every post you publish gets deleted immediately. Once this combination of punches hits, no matter how the CCP tries to spin its narrative, it cannot gloss over the pain in your own body. If at this time their social circle—that is, the closed echo chamber—happens to break apart upon leaving campus or the factory, their belief will collapse even faster.

To put it bluntly, people never transform because they lost a debate; it is because their bodies first refuse to accept that set of narratives. I have seen it all. What have I seen? Students who used to argue abroad defending the CCP are now attending June Fourth memorial rallies. Or young people who were locked down during group incidents, whose families couldn't get in touch with them, began secretly taking screenshots to save those deleted posts. This is the most dangerous period. Where does the danger lie? It is the most dangerous stage in a person's entire life trajectory after a belief collapses, because it generates a lot of negative feelings, such as a sense of vacuum, meaninglessness, anger, or shame. Some even grow to detest their former selves, while others take a more extreme path of political estrangement from their parents. Ah, this is one of the most frequent words used when falling out of love with the regime. Some retreat into cynicism, to sum it up highly, and toss away all of politics by using a phrase like "all crows are black under heaven." Some find another object to kneel before, using the exact same intensity to worship another complete narrative. Others fall into long-term depression, because humans are quite strange creatures; losing a sense of meaning is actually extremely painful. Then, whenever people have free time, they want to grab onto something, and at this moment, whoever hands over a new explanation, well, they might just dive headfirst into it.

So how should this path be walked? I think it still depends on a few things: First, whether there is anyone around to talk to them, whether there are books other than propaganda close at hand, along with the lived experience of real people, whether there is still some money in their pocket, and whether their personal safety can be guaranteed. If all of these are present, they can slowly recover. Second, if not, most people will likely ruin themselves halfway. The iron fist only smashes people to pieces; it doesn't care about putting them back together. A Little Pink being awakened doesn't mean they can turn into someone who can make their own decisions. I even think that the predecessors of most Xianzhong attackers were Little Pinks. To crawl out of the Little Pink camp, a person's ideology must truly learn a few things: First, learn to live in a world without an omnipotent savior, accept uncertainty, and acknowledge the limitations of one's own judgment. Second, directly separate specific individuals from that power that refuses to accept criticism, allowing oneself to love oneself without swearing allegiance to this fucking regime, while also allowing oneself to have once deeply participated in that symbolic order without infinitely whipping one's past self out of shame. You might not become a professional dissident, but objectively speaking, for China, you are already a negative asset. For the individual, this is the recovery of subjectivity. For the fucking CCP system, this is a permanent increase in control costs.

So, don't try to persuade these Little Pinks, and there's no need to argue with them; arguing is meaningless. What changes people has never been logic, but what? It's the cost and benefit functions within the game. As long as the costs and benefits are swapped, even if you tell them that the fucking idiot Xi Jinping is incredibly great, they won't believe a damn word of it. Arguing about this is useless, and even open information won't cure them. But once the costs and benefits change, rest assured, you won't need to say anything; they will change on their own. The construction of this building of Little Pinks relies on collective isolation, plus the temporary absence of the iron fist. Its demolition process is just the reverse: the presence of the iron fist, combined with the loosening of the circle, and what else? It's the direct cutoff of the phantom field in their minds. Those who can't adjust at home might hide behind a glass cover, but that only delays the arrival of the iron fist; it doesn't eliminate it. Now, the CCP is engaged in crazy infighting internally and scraping the bottom of the barrel externally; it's only a matter of time before it hits them personally. Therefore, whether you are counting on debunking rumors, spreading rumors, circumventing the Great Firewall, or posting more foreign media reports—hey, if you expect this to cure this disease, that's impossible.

This system of the CCP has indeed compressed the daily control costs quite a bit, but these costs are not constant; they will also rebound. When the CCP is having a good time, how low are these costs? Hey, once the CCP can no longer act as the protector of property rights, the costs will be sky-high. But what is the most valuable thing the CCP has destroyed? It is that the CCP has wiped out the intermediate language of the entire society. Things like the language of negotiation, the language of debating rules, and the language of translating pain into a collective understanding are all gone. Friction will accumulate, and when it accumulates to the breaking point, a society without an intermediate language is left with only two forms of expression: either more silent lying-flat, or a more sudden, desperate counterattack. At the end of 2022, everyone saw this happen.

Finally, I still want to say that subjectivity is never something someone gives you. What is it? It is the scarce ability to choose to shoulder the judgment yourself after the perfect fantasy has shattered. In other words, it is to transform from relying on that collective fantasy to completing what? Completing self-construction. What is self-construction? It is: I choose, I bear the consequences, and I acknowledge and accept uncertainty. This is the reconstruction of subjectivity, not just following some idiot's claim of historical inevitability and believing it, nor is it the shift from saying the CCP is good to saying how great it is to oppose the CCP. Actually, this structure is still the structure of a Little Pink. Whether you say the CCP is good or how great it is to oppose the CCP, these are both the same structure; the object has just changed from the CCP to anti-CCP. So, what I am talking about is not this state, but a complete return to the state of what the self truly wants. If you return to this state and still think the CCP is incredibly awesome and Emperor You Xi is truly great, then essentially, you are no longer a Little Pink. Of course, when a person returns to this kind of judgment, I believe they won't reach such a fucking stupid conclusion. Alright, that's it for today's show. If you like the program, thank you all for your support.