Yao Yao Jiang: Gao Xiaosong, the 'Cultural Lipstick,' Why Was He Suddenly Abandoned?

This video provides an in-depth analysis of the rise and fall of Gao Xiaosong, a well-known Chinese cultural figure, from being a "national mentor" to being completely banned. Gao Xiaosong once rose to fame through programs like Sayings, and later became Jack Ma's "cultural lipstick" and an executive at Alibaba. However, as US-China relations deteriorated and online nationalism surged, his liberal elite image gradually became a political liability. After being besieged by netizens during a livestream in 2020, accompanied by Jack Ma's loss of power and Alibaba's defensive posture, Gao Xiaosong was officially labeled as promoting "historical nihilism" and faced a nationwide ban across all platforms. The video points out that Gao Xiaosong's fate reflects the political reality of the Xi Jinping era where "intellectuals of convenience" are used and discarded.

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In 2012, shortly after Gao Xiaosong made a comeback with his online video program Sayings, he openly stated that his dream profession was to be a retainer. He said that retainers reap the benefits without bearing the loyalty, and that he was merely selling some knowledge and culture without any obligation to die alongside his master. Three years later, Jack Ma actually gave him this exact position: Chairman of Alibaba Music, Chairman of Alibaba's Entertainment Strategic Committee, Jack Ma's songwriter, and the author of a biography of Alibaba that remains unpublished to this day. But by 2021, Jack Ma had lost power, Gao Xiaosong's programs were taken offline, and he left Alibaba. The question is, did he go down together with Jack Ma, or had he already been abandoned by Chinese audiences long before that? How did he, acting as a cultural lipstick and a public intellectual, become universally reviled overnight? There have been rumors of his comeback several times—why has it proven impossible? And who is stopping him? Today we are going to unravel these mysteries.

Gao Xiaosong's second wave of fame began with a car accident. At 10:30 PM on May 9, 2011, on the East Dongzhimen Outer Street in Beijing, a white Infiniti SUV crashed into a car waiting at a red light, triggering a four-car collision and injuring multiple people. When traffic police arrived at the scene, driver Gao Xiaosong reeked of alcohol. He later told the police that he had been drinking from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM, finishing a bottle of white wine and a bottle of liquor before driving away alone. His blood alcohol content reached 243.04 mg per 100 ml, while China's legal drunk driving threshold was 80 mg, putting him at over three times the limit. In fact, he already had a drunk driving record from his time in the United States. In a 2012 episode of Sayings, he recounted his experiences of traffic violations and community service in the US. Clearly, his drunk driving in Beijing was not due to ignorance, but rather driving knowingly despite knowing it was illegal. Eight days later, Gao Xiaosong stood in court. With China's criminal penalties for drunk driving just newly implemented, he became the first Chinese celebrity to be convicted under the new regulations. In court, he offered no defense, writing down: "Alcohol beclouds the intellect, let my case be a warning." The court sentenced him to six months of criminal detention and a 4,000 RMB fine. Gao Xiaosong said that all he had left was remorse, having previously thought that drinking gave him freedom, only to lose his freedom because of drinking. This remains Gao Xiaosong's most indelible stain. Later, whenever he spoke about rules, civilization, and civic responsibility, this car accident would invariably be brought up again. A man who lectured others on reason had almost destroyed other people's lives with his car.

Under normal circumstances, Gao Xiaosong's reputation should have been ruined right there. But what happened next was the exact opposite. On November 8, 2011, Gao Xiaosong was released. Less than five months later, in March 2012, the online video program Sayings went live. There was no band, no stage, and no interviewees; the camera showed only a desk, a bookshelf, and a folding fan, with Gao Xiaosong talking directly into the lens alone. Within 24 hours of its first episode launching, view counts exceeded 1 million; by the thirteenth episode, cumulative views approached 30 million, and the first season eventually surpassed 100 million views. The drunk driving incident did not end his public career; instead, Sayings transformed him from a criminal musician into one of the most popular knowledge narrators on the internet. What Sayings sold was not rigorous academic research, but talking points that viewers could immediately retell upon hearing them. Wars in his mouth were reduced to the personal grievances of a few individuals; American universities were anecdotes about alumni and admissions officers; films, European royal families, and Chinese history were all spun into engaging stories by him. While drunk driving explains why some people never forgave Gao Xiaosong, it fails to explain why he only became universally loathed many years later. His most serious scandal actually occurred back in 2011, yet the peak of his career came after it. This shows that audiences at the time separated the two issues. They acknowledged that Gao Xiaosong had indeed committed a crime, but that did not stop vast numbers of people from wanting to listen to his stories. Sayings also rewrote his public identity. Previously a musician known for writing "Your Desk Mate," from then on he began explaining America, history, and the world to hundreds of millions of viewers, and Gao Xiaosong successfully completed the transition from an entertainer to a "teacher."

From the very beginning, Gao Xiaosong drew strict boundaries around this identity. At the end of 2012, he attended a book launch event for Sayings at Tsinghua University. A reporter asked him: When you talk about history, do you strive to stay close to historical facts? Gao Xiaosong's reply was that he was not studying history, but merely sharing the impressions formed from official histories, unofficial histories, and poetry that he had read. The reporter then brought up his ideal profession written about in his book. Gao Xiaosong said he enjoyed acting as a retainer. Retainers could offer counsel to their lords, but they did not need to be loyal to the sovereign nor die with them. His exact words were: "I am simply selling some knowledge and culture." This was the definition Gao Xiaosong gave to the role he chose. Three years later, Jack Ma gave him the opportunity to cash in on this ideal.

In 2014, Gao Xiaosong and Song Ke had just left Evergrande Music. The two had collaborated in the music industry for over twenty years, with Gao Xiaosong taking the front stage to pitch business as if it were ideals and stories, while Song Ke was more adept at calculating copyright revenues and markets. At the end of that year, they discussed their next career steps at a Korean BBQ restaurant in the United States. Continuing to make records would not solve the music industry's dilemmas; they wanted to find an internet platform possessing user payment and transaction capabilities. The opportunity arrived quickly. On December 28, 2014, Gao Xiaosong held a concert of his works in Hangzhou and invited Jack Ma to attend. Jack Ma did not come, but sent someone to ask: "Do you still want to do something in the music industry?" Gao Xiaosong later described feeling a secret thrill at the time. He understood that proactively chasing a boss versus a boss actively seeking you out commanded entirely different price tags. Upon returning, instead of writing dozens of pages of business plans, he wrote only about three hundred words, outlining the pain points, scale, and opportunities of the Chinese music industry. Jack Ma replied promptly: "How soon can you get to Hangzhou?" On January 2, 2015, Gao Xiaosong, accompanied by Song Ke, walked into the Taiji Zen Monastery at Xixi Wetland in Hangzhou. It did not look like an office, yet the three of them discussed a major business deal. For over two hours, Song Ke laid out the math for Jack Ma: China's music-related industries claimed a market size of 200 billion RMB annually, and if 30 percent could be shifted online in the future, it would represent a 60 billion RMB platform. Gao Xiaosong and Song Ke needed a sufficiently large platform, while Jack Ma needed two people capable of pitching music dreams on a grand enough scale. Gao Xiaosong later joked that they, these "free-spirited cranes," were talked into the "997" lifestyle by Jack Ma in just a few words—working from 9 AM to 9 PM, seven days a week, like draft animals.

Following that conversation, the two abandoned their shares in Evergrande Music and pivoted to join Alibaba. In March 2015, Xiami Music and Tiantian Dongting were integrated into Alibaba Music. In July, Gao Xiaosong officially took office as Chairman, with Song Ke serving as CEO. During his first public speech wearing an Alibaba employee badge, Gao Xiaosong said that previously a person could speak casually, but after putting on the badge, "one cannot speak recklessly anymore." At the same time, he added that he and Song Ke had accumulated massive domestic and international resources that previously lacked a platform to be unleashed, and now the entire Alibaba organization could support them. A department receiving a request today would come back with a solution the very day after. Finally, he publicly set a goal: within three years, transform Alibaba Music into a world-class music institution. Yet ideals are plump, while reality is skeletal. In April 2016, Tiantian Dongting was transformed into Ali Planet. He didn't just want to...

making a music player, trying to pack song listening, fan-chasing, live performances, fan interaction, artist trading, and merchandise all into a single app. Users who originally opened Tiantian Dongting just to find a song suddenly couldn't find the familiar player; those who wanted to make a music industry platform didn't get a truly handy workbench either. A few months later, Ali Music's Ali Planet stopped its main services. Gao Xiaosong later admitted that turning Tiantian Dongting into a weird hybrid in the eyes of users was a wrong decision. The goal of a three-year world-class music institution was not achieved. According to the logic of an ordinary company, a chairman who bet on the wrong product and lost users should leave. But Gao Xiaosong did not leave Alibaba. In September 2016, he stepped down as chairman of Ali Music and transferred to become chairman of the Alibaba Entertainment Strategic Committee. This title sounds bigger, but the job is emptier: responsible for international strategy, connecting cultural resources, and representing Alibaba at movie and entertainment events. On the surface, it was a promotion; in reality, Jack Ma rediscovered Gao Xiaosong's most valuable use. Gao Xiaosong is not suitable for running an app, but he is very suitable for running the cultural image of the boss and the company. Alibaba originally wanted to invite him to do the music business, but in the end, it kept a retained guest. Gao Xiaosong's description of a retained guest also changed. In 2012, he said that retained guests do not need to be buried with the master; after entering Alibaba, however, he called his new position a closer retained guest, and even said, "You support me, but ultimately I sell this life for you." A person who originally emphasized freedom and did not need to fulfill righteousness for a master finally found a lord willing to swear loyalty to right here under Jack Ma.

In 2017, Jack Ma wanted to make a martial arts short film. The film was called Gong Shou Dao, and the protagonist was Jack Ma himself. Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Wu Jing, Sammo Hung, Zou Shiming, and a string of kung fu stars took turns appearing, but in the end, they had to yield the stage to this not-so-strong internet boss. Gao Xiaosong was responsible for another task: making Jack Ma look not just like a rich man playing around, but like someone with cultural ideals. He composed and produced the theme song "Feng Qingyang" and invited Faye Wong to sing a duet with Jack Ma. Gao Xiaosong later described the recording process, saying that Faye Wong was a natural gifted talent bestowed by heaven, while Jack Ma's advantage was public speaking. He also said he felt one take was about enough, but Jack Ma insisted it was still not good enough. Singing a duet with Faye Wong, because Faye Wong sang first, her performance was extremely brilliant. Upon hearing it, Jack Ma was startled and said, "Ah, she sang so well, how am I supposed to sing?" This is the value of a retained guest. The boss provides financial support, and Gao Xiaosong dresses the boss up to look like a man of culture. When Jack Ma did rural teacher charity work, Gao Xiaosong wrote songs for him. Green Book, invested in by Alibaba, won an Oscar, and he appeared at Hollywood events in his capacity as chairman of the Alibaba Entertainment Strategic Committee. When DingTalk held a press conference, he took the stage with a folding fan, talking about how he was chased to work by employees using DingTalk. When Alibaba published Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Strategic Edition, he became the chief strategist once again. What best illustrates this relationship is an unpublished book. Gao Xiaosong was commissioned to write A Biography of Alibaba. According to him, this was not ordinary corporate history, but a record of a magnificent era through this group of people at Alibaba. He revised the manuscript at least five times, once announcing it would be published in 2020, but to this day, the book has never officially appeared. Jack Ma gave Gao Xiaosong a title, platform, and resources, while Gao Xiaosong composed music, found Faye Wong, wrote a biography, and entered Hollywood for Jack Ma, also helping Alibaba frame its business expansion as cultural ideals. This was an open exchange. Gao Xiaosong was Jack Ma's cultural lipstick; he did not decide the business direction for Jack Ma, but he could retouch the face of an e-commerce and financial empire to make it more literary, more international, and more human.

Yet Gao Xiaosong, this cultural lipstick, served more than just Jack Ma. Many people later called Gao Xiaosong a public intellectual, as if he stood on the opposite side of the system for a long time to enlighten the people, but he never saw himself that way. In 2012, the opening of Xiayoushuo clearly stated "Don't be a public intellectual." In interviews, he even disparaged China's public intellectuals of the time as "plaza-style warriors," believing they merely stirred up emotions with inflammatory language and were not true intellectuals. Ironically, the internet warriors who later besieged Gao Xiaosong were precisely a group that judged stances based on emotion, and the crime they pinned on him was precisely that of a public intellectual. Gao Xiaosong indeed loved freedom, loved the United States, and often made judgments on Chinese society. But what he left behind the most was not continuous questioning of power structures, but historical anecdotes, elite university stories, movie lore, and elite travel experiences. He had his audience sit in front of the screen listening to him talk about the world, yet he rarely pinned problems down to China's system. The 2015 speech at Alibaba had a typical moment. He talked about how China's music charts were long occupied by a small number of idols, and just as he was about to pursue the social reasons behind it, he immediately veered away, saying this was not the government's problem, but a persistent flaw of our nation running through the past 2,000 years. In this way, the government was no longer the problem; all problems fell squarely onto national character. This kind of knowledge product is safe for commercial platforms and gentle toward political power. It can appear internationally open and daring to speak, yet it rarely continuously questions injustices and public issues in reality. Therefore, in the so-called era of public intellectuals, Gao Xiaosong's more accurate identity was not a public intellectual, but a know-it-all. He knew a lot, spoke well, and was willing to sell the world he had seen to the public, but he never truly acted like a public intellectual whose responsibility is to criticize power. This also explains why he could walk freely between Alibaba and official platforms. In 2019, he joined the Jiusan Society led by the Chinese Communist Party, stating that he had finally joined the big family of intellectuals he had longed for.

In the spring of 2020, when China needed to pivot from lockdowns, death, and fear toward "victory" and the resumption of work, he handed in another culturally timely product. This time, Gao Xiaosong applied makeup to the political narrative. On April 19, 2020, the epidemic had severely battered the whole world. One World: Together at Home, jointly initiated by Lady Gaga and the World Health Organization, had just finished broadcasting. On the same day, Lao Lang initiated a 15-second a cappella relay in his WeChat Moments. Upon seeing this, the Damai team pulled together a temporary group chat. Heads of platforms like NetEase Cloud Music, Weibo, and Xiami successively joined the discussion. By 11:30 PM, Gao Xiaosong was pulled into the group and took on the role of public initiator. It can be seen that this idea was not created all by himself in his study through a sudden stroke of inspiration over a phone call. At that time, the platform, execution team, and music industry network had already started moving first. Afterward, they needed a cultural face that everyone knew and who could mobilize veteran, middle-aged, and young generations of musicians, and Gao Xiaosong happened to meet these conditions. At 3:00 AM, the group basically finalized the theme. At 7:56 the next morning, another nearly five-hour conference call was held. Several principles were quickly determined: no title sponsorship, no inserted advertisements, no membership thresholds, no fundraising, and open to all qualified video platforms. Up to this point, it was still just a spontaneous action inspired by the Western music community. Overseas musicians responded to the epidemic with online performances, and Chinese musicians also wanted to hold a free, non-fundraising charity concert. After Gao Xiaosong joined, the event quickly shifted to a different tier. The a cappella relay that originally belonged to the music circle was pushed to dozens of platforms and audiences nationwide, and the spontaneous response among peers also began to shoulder a larger task: telling the story of victory and restarting after the epidemic for China. Its political implications were subsequently written entirely into the initiative. On the afternoon of April 20, the initiative was officially released. Gao Xiaosong named it Believe in the Future. The initiative was written very clearly: people had experienced fear, participated in the battle, and would surely achieve victory; the next step of walking out of pain, resuming work and production, and restarting required believing in the country, believing in society, and believing in the future. Nine days later, on April 29, Xi Jinping chaired a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee, officially announcing for the first time that the battles to defend Wuhan and Hubei had achieved decisive results, and the national war against the epidemic had achieved major strategic achievements. Five days later, on May 4, the first show of Believe in the Future was broadcast. Gao Xiaosong accurately captured the emotion the Chinese Communist Party needed most at the time: mourning should end, society needed to resume work, and lockdowns, death, and fear should also be reinterpreted as a joint battle on the verge of victory. The official announcement of strategic achievements was paired with Gao Xiaosong making this singing of victory sound less like an editorial in People's Daily. It had Faye Wong, Na Ying, Pu Shu, Zhou Xun, Lao Lang, and Jackson Yee use music to say "believe in the future." Once political slogans were packaged by stars, living rooms, and guitars, they no longer looked like slogans, but more like a nationwide spontaneous comfort. And this was precisely the cultural back-scratching tool Gao Xiaosong handed to the Chinese Communist Party. Believe in the Future ultimately produced four shows, with hundreds of staff members coordinating musicians, record labels, and dozens of platforms, and singers completing performances in their own living rooms, recording studios, streets, and rehearsal rooms. Gao Xiaosong even picked up a guitar in the third show and sang his own work. Cumulative viewership across the four shows reached 440 million person-times. When Youku undertook content production, it actively incorporated footage of medical personnel, laborers, and the resumption of work. Review articles from the Alibaba system described this event as a manifestation of Alibaba Culture and Entertainment's organizational capabilities. CCTV participated in the broadcast, and People's Daily Overseas Edition reported on it across a full page, stating that it brought warmth, encouragement, and positive energy. This is the most concrete instance of the Chinese Communist Party's cultural lipstick. Relying on his own political intuition, connections in the music circle, and the Alibaba platform, Gao Xiaosong turned epidemic prevention victory and the restoration of production into a program that audiences were willing to actively open and watch. The system gained a gentle project of winning people's hearts, while Alibaba showcased

demonstrating his organizational skills once again, Gao Xiaosong proved that he alone could assemble this lineup within twenty days. After the performance, he mentioned in an interview that internet users frequently screenshot his images and edit short videos to attack him, but he did not feel aggrieved. He thanked the internet and this era, and said he was willing to do whatever he could for it.

On the evening of June 28, 2020, the public welfare livestreaming event "Celebrities Reading Masterpieces" went live. The initiators included People's Daily New Media, People's Literature Publishing House, and Dragonfly FM. The theme was graduation season and classic reading, with guests including Mai Jia, Ma Boyong, Lu Yu, and Ma Dong. For Gao Xiaosong, this should have been a safer activity than a concert. The screen still showed a bookshelf, a folding fan, and that familiar face, but the audience was not there to listen to books. After Gao Xiaosong appeared, the bullet comments were rapidly flooded with "Get lost," "Public intellectual," and "American." The livestream was interrupted, and the feed was never restored. This was exactly forty-nine days after the final show of the "Believe in the Future" concert series on May 10. During these forty-nine days, Gao Xiaosong had not been hit by any new scandals. So why was the same person the general producer of an all-star concert in May, yet when he sat in the livestreaming room in June, the audience refused to even give him a chance to speak? Simply citing drunk driving and historical errors cannot answer this question. The drunk driving happened in 2011, and a few months later, "Xiaoshuo" still became an overnight sensation. When the show returned in 2017, its three-month view count still exceeded one hundred million. The audience had long known that he tended to exaggerate, would make corrections, and possessed an elitist temperament, but at that time, people were still willing to listen to him speak. However, by 2020, the perspective from which the audience viewed him had changed. A conversation by the translation blogger Gu Dabaihua from three years prior perhaps best illustrates this shift. On the 2017 online variety show "I Can BB," Gu Dabaihua talked about wanting to travel far when he was young, and Gao Xiaosong said, "Then why don't you just go?" The other person replied that he had no money. At that time, Gao Xiaosong only let out a dismissive sound of realization. This sound indicated that Gao Xiaosong completely failed to comprehend the weight of the words "no money." To him, traveling far only depended on whether you wanted to do it; but for ordinary people, the first question was whether there was money in their wallet. This conversation caused awkwardness for only a few seconds in 2017, but it was later repeatedly brought up. Early audiences listened to him talk about the United States, travel, and elite universities, and primarily felt a sense of envy; later audiences, however, began to question whether the casual detachment he spoke of was life wisdom or simply the confidence provided by family wealth and connections. The Harvard controversy in 2018 pushed this relationship a step further. Gao Xiaosong posted on Weibo that he had officially joined Harvard University as a researcher, but netizens quickly checked the Harvard website, where his English title was actually Associate. What he claimed to be no longer received total acceptance from the audience. In the past, the two words "Harvard" added to his credibility; now, netizens would check the university's webpage word for word to examine whether he was padding his resume. Gao Xiaosong's early advantage was "I have seen it, and you haven't." In the era of short videos, more international students, immigrants, and overseas Chinese spoke on the Chinese internet every day, and ordinary people could directly search school websites and historical materials. He no longer held a monopoly on the interpretation of the United States, and the audience now had the tools to verify things for themselves.

More fatally, the US-China relationship changed the meaning of the United States. The trade war, Huawei sanctions, Meng Wanzhou incident, Hong Kong protests, and disputes over the origins of the pandemic occurred one after another. Gao Xiaosong's past appreciation of American university public culture and lifestyles, which originally were merely his personal observations, were later reinterpreted as his political stance. Having lived in America had originally enhanced his authority when speaking, but later it provoked questions about whether he was loyal to the Party and the state. By then, the term "public intellectual" was no longer a social role, but a cyber indictment: worshiping foreign things, being elite, speaking for the United States, being overly critical of China, and remaining too distant from the lives of ordinary people. Gao Xiaosong himself had rejected this label in 2012, but that did not stop people from pinning it on him now. The online patriotism cultivated by the CCP over many years provided a standard for judgment: in the face of conflict, first distinguish between friend and enemy; when evaluating figures, first ask where their loyalties lie. The rise of short videos broke down Gao Xiaosong's long-form programs of the past ten years into dozen-second pieces of evidence. A complete long-form program allowed people to see causes and effects, while short-form video clips left behind only fragmented remarks with distinct stances. The complexity of a story that he spent an hour building could be definitively labeled by a short video clip in ten seconds. By June 28, long-term public opinion education had already taken effect. The propaganda system dictated what constituted a correct stance, short video platforms rewarded emotion and anger, and netizens sought out targets on their own. The most ironic part was that People's Daily New Media invited a guest, yet netizens used the official promotional scale of loyalty to conclude that People's Daily had invited the wrong person. Therefore, the Gao Xiaosong of 2020 was no longer just someone who liked to show off and could correct mistakes. In the eyes of many netizens, he was also a "public intellectual" who spoke for the United States and whose political stance was suspicious. This was the real reason why the livestreaming room suddenly went out of control.

On the evening of July 15, 2020, in Beijing, more than a dozen Alibaba executives sat around a dining table. They were not there to criticize Gao Xiaosong, but to celebrate his fifth anniversary of joining Alibaba. Gao Xiaosong posted the group photo online, made his Alibaba employee ID number and rank public, and wrote: "Traveling thousands of miles alone in youth, how wonderful it is to find one's organization in middle age." This photo was taken only seventeen days after the livestream was interrupted. While the outside audience refused to listen to him speak, Alibaba internally still acknowledged him as one of their own. Even though his throne as the nation's tutor had been overturned, he was still an Alibaba executive, backed by one of China's most powerful business groups. What he did not know, however, was that the master he served as a retainer had a safe period of only one hundred and one days left. On October 24, 2020, at the Bund Summit in Shanghai, Jack Ma stepped onto the stage in a dark suit, criticizing China's financial regulation, criticizing the banks' "pawnshop mentality," and stating that yesterday's methods could not govern tomorrow. That was the last time Jack Ma appeared on China's public stage in an aggressive posture. When Gao Xiaosong said the wrong thing, he faced bullet comments, but when Jack Ma criticized regulation, he faced the state apparatus. On November 2, Jack Ma and Ant executives were summoned by four regulatory departments. On November 3, the Shanghai Stock Exchange suspended Ant Group's listing. This was followed by an antitrust investigation, a fine of 18.228 billion yuan, and a drastic reduction in Jack Ma's public appearances. Gao Xiaosong was driven out of the livestreaming room in June, and Jack Ma fell from grace at the Bund in October. The audience abandoned Gao Xiaosong first, and four months later Jack Ma lost power. Jack Ma did not create the public's aversion to Gao Xiaosong, but he caused him to lose his final layer of protection.

In February 2021, Xiami Music ceased operations, and the music empire that Gao Xiaosong had envisioned building when he entered Alibaba finally reached its end. On March 16, Gao Xiaosong stepped down as a director of Alibaba Music in Beijing. Right around that same window, media outlets like the Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing had demanded Alibaba cut back its media assets because Alibaba possessed excessive public opinion influence through assets such as Weibo, Youku, the South China Morning Post, and China Business Journal. By this time, Gao Xiaosong's music business had long failed, his personal image was fraught with controversy, and Alibaba had shifted from expansion to full defense. When regulators began questioning why Alibaba owned so many media outlets, cultural executives like Gao Xiaosong—who were high-profile, pro-American, and continuously embroiled in political controversies—turned from assets into liabilities. Gao Xiaosong had said in 2012 that retainers do not need to be buried with their masters. Reality proved colder than he expected: before the master had even fallen, he indeed did not need to be buried with him; but once the master lost power, the retainer would also lose the parlor that provided him a space for idle talk. In June 2020, the audience in the livestreaming room had already driven Gao Xiaosong down from the podium; next, the authorities' task was to institutionalize this outcome.

On April 9, 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China's Reporting Center launched a reporting section for harmful information concerning historical nihilism, with a scope of acceptance that included distorting the history of the Party, the history of New China, the history of reform and opening up, and the history of socialist development, attacking the Party's leadership, and negating revolutionary culture and advanced socialist culture. Four months later, this set of reporting standards fell upon Gao Xiaosong's batch of old programs. Around August 27, netizens discovered that programs like "Xiaosong's Talks" could no longer be searched normally on some platforms. On August 30, the Chinese Academy of History published a long article explicitly naming Gao Xiaosong, systematically organizing his remarks on Chiang Kai-shek, the Xi'an Incident, the Yasukuni Shrine, Zheng Chenggong, the Party and the military, and the American system, and ultimately classifying them all as "historical nihilism." Why was the Chinese Academy of History qualified to define the nature of Gao Xiaosong? Because it was not a conventional academic institution at all; it was a national-level historical institution established specifically under Xi Jinping after he came to power to control the right to historical interpretation. In January 2019, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences integrated its six existing research institutes: archaeology, ancient history, modern history, world history, borderland history, and historical theory. On the day of the unveiling, Xi Jinping sent a special congratulatory letter demanding that it construct the discipline, academic structure, and discourse system of history with Chinese characteristics, and fulfill the role of supporting governance and educating people. Propaganda Department head Huang Kunmin personally unveiled the plaque, and the academy soon launched major research projects such as "Xi Jinping on the Science of History," "History of the Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation," and "Research on China's Governance Systems Throughout History." The head of the academy also publicly announced that it would promptly speak out against ideological trends such as historical nihilism. In 2023, Xi Jinping personally visited the academy to inspect it. This was Xi Jinping's historical think tank, as well as the official historical refereeing organ. It constructed a historical view for Xi Jinping and dictated to him which history could be told and how, and which viewpoints were to be struck down as "historical nihilism." Therefore, this long article was not a few scholars discussing history with Gao Xiaosong, but rather Xi Jinping's historical institution conducting a political appraisal of him.

. His method is to mix two completely different types of issues together. The first type is factual errors that can be verified. For example, Gao Xiaosong once said that Kuomintang general Wei Lihuang went to Taiwan later. The fact is that Wei Lihuang went to Hong Kong in 1949 and returned to mainland China in 1955. This is a clear error. A person who presents personal impressions as history should be corrected and should pay the price in credibility for such carelessness. The second type, however, belongs to political interpretation. For example, how to evaluate Chiang Kai-shek, how to understand the Xi'an Incident, whether one agrees with the American system, and whether the military should be loyal to a political party or the state? These are viewpoints that are inherently open to debate, yet the Chinese Academy of History placed factual errors and differences in stance side-by-side, mixed them together, and ultimately reached a political conclusion that this person's historical view is dangerous.

Just at the end of August, media reported that Gao Xiaosong had left Alibaba, and Alibaba's entertainment division only replied that they were unclear about the situation and did not announce a reason. In over a year, the audience, Alibaba, and the authorities had successively closed their doors to him. Three days later, on September 2, the National Radio and Television Administration issued a notice requiring television and online audiovisual platforms to use political literacy as a standard for personnel selection. One sentence in the notice was very direct: "Personnel whose political stance is incorrect and who are alienated from the Party and the state shall be resolutely not employed." The programs had already been taken down, the state-level historical institution had completed its characterization, and the competent authorities had made the political criteria public. From this moment on, platforms were no longer facing the question of whether the audience would criticize Gao Xiaosong, but whether employing him would cause trouble. In May 2022, Gao Xiaosong and Song Ke withdrew from the list of shareholders of Alibaba Music, and his connection with Alibaba at the corporate level ended completely. But Gao Xiaosong did not give up entirely. In November 2023, he quietly launched the audio program "Xiaode." The entry for "Xiaode" was not on the homepage of Youku or iQIYI, but on the WeChat mini-program Xiaozhou ARK and Qingting FM. A "national mentor" who once had hundreds of millions of views per season was left with only his voice upon his comeback, forced to hide in a mini-program to test the waters. "Xiaode" produced a total of 240 episodes. On November 19, 2024, the final episode was broadcast, and the program concluded. Since then, he has neither returned to mainstream video platforms nor produced any new programs. So-called "new Gao Xiaosong programs" and "Gao Xiaosong live streams" have continuously appeared online, many of which are actually re-edited and repackaged old programs, or even AI voice imitations. By May 2026, Gao Xiaosong himself had to come out to clarify that since the last episode of "Xiaode," he has not done any live or recorded audio or video content, and he is currently not operating. This is his true situation.

If the audience criticizes him, he can change platforms; if Alibaba doesn't want him, he can find other investors. But after the Chinese Academy of History labeled him with historical nihilism, and the National Radio and Television Administration announced that personnel whose political stance is incorrect and who are alienated from the Party and the state shall be resolutely not employed, no Chinese platform dared to let him truly return. The bad reputation among the public can be washed away slowly, but political characterization is very difficult to overturn. It is not that Gao Xiaosong did not try to make a comeback; he simply retreated from a public figure watched by hundreds of millions to a mini-program. After the mini-program stopped updating, many of the "Gao Xiaosong" figures continuing to be active online are not even him. This is the most realistic "use and discard" approach of the Xi Jinping era toward "intellectuals" like Gao Xiaosong. When the system needed an open, international, and human-touch cultural face, Gao Xiaosong was very useful. He could add cultural flair for Jack Ma and Alibaba, and could package "believing in the country and resuming work and production" into a charity performance with stars. When it came to the time when Xi Jinping demanded that those with incorrect political stances be resolutely not employed, the US-China confrontation became the yardstick for testing loyalty, and the right to historical interpretation was tightened, while Gao Xiaosong's international experience and liberal appearance immediately turned from decoration into a stain. Gao Xiaosong did not change suddenly; he has always liked the United States, loved to talk about his experiences, was exaggerated and confident, and knew how to cooperate with large platforms. What changed was the system's use for and tolerance of such people. So, why is Gao Xiaosong's reputation ruined? This is not a story of an innocent intellectual being persecuted. Gao Xiaosong was never that innocent, nor that brave. This is a clever cultural businessman who thought he was just selling knowledge and not touching power, only to find out in the end that in China, who is allowed to sell knowledge is determined by power.