The Chinese Philosopher Americans Can’t Stop Fighting About

Yiyang Zhuge learned last week that when you go extremely viral, the people you have been following for years suddenly start following you back. Zhuge logged onto X and found that a string of famous professors and scholars were in her list of new followers. A PhD candidate in political philosophy at Boston College, Zhuge had previously only lurked on X to keep up with the latest debates and gossip in academia. The vast majority of her social media activity happens on the Chinese internet, where she goes by the alias Zhong Shu and hosts a popular podcast with hundreds of thousands of loyal listeners.

Late last month, Zhuge, who is in her late twenties, interviewed Christopher Nolan, one of the most influential directors in Hollywood, who was in Beijing promoting The Odyssey. Rather than asking about celebrities or Hollywood, Zhuge posed a series of deeply philosophical questions to Nolan about the Christianization of Greek philosophy and how to portray heroes in films. The first thing she asked: “Are you a bard for a civilization at dusk?”

Nolan was visibly impressed by Zhuge. After the interview was published in China, Geoff Keighley, a video game journalist and the son of Nolan’s longtime friend David Keighley, shared the interview on X, calling it “a great listen.” Keighley’s video has been watched over 18 million times, and when Zhuge later posted the interview on her own X account, it racked up another 6.9 million views.

For the first time, Zhuge had become the main character of the English-speaking internet. She was being praised, mocked, criticized, and defended all at the same time. Many people said it was the best interview Nolan has done for The Odyssey, while the National Review called it a “CCP hostage video.” But everyone ultimately wanted to know the same thing: Who was this young Chinese woman with a bob haircut talking about the decline of civilizations?

While almost no one in the West knows her name, Zhuge is already one of the most prominent young intellectuals in China and has been interviewed by many of the country’s cultural elite. She was featured in Vogue China as an example of a successful woman in her twenties and frequently shares yoga and fitness tips to her 360,000 fans on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu.

When I spoke to Zhuge this week, she framed her success as being born out of personal tragedy. “I was going through an adulterous divorce in which my ex-husband sued me and I accumulated a lot of legal debt,” she says. “I felt discouraged in the English-speaking academia because of certain personal experiences related to that personal tragedy, so I turned my attention back to the Chinese-speaking world to build a career there and pay off my debt.”

When I started digging into Zhuge’s career, I was shocked by her level of productivity. Aside from publishing philosophy translations and writing articles for Chinese media outlets, she has recorded more than 360 episodes of her podcast Monologues of a Committed Observer in just the last three years. That’s an average of one new episode every three days. Most of the time, she just monologues about political science concepts for a half an hour, seemingly unscripted. On XiaoyuzhouFM, the most popular podcast streaming platform in China, she has over 940,000 subscribers.

But despite her prolific posting, Zhuge claims she isn’t interested in being famous. “I have no attachment to fame and no desire to preserve it for its own sake,” she tells me. “What I want is enough freedom and time to build a life centered on thought. That life requires some money, but not very much.”

View From America

When Zhuge asked Nolan if he saw himself as “a bard for a civilization at dusk,” she says she didn’t have a particular civilization in mind.

She views the question instead as part of the long philosophical tradition of pondering the demise of value systems. “I was not primarily attempting to issue a verdict on the contemporary United States,” she says, but “people are free to interpret the phrase through current debates about American or Western decline.”

That’s certainly how many people on Western social media interpreted it. On X, YouTube, and Reddit, commenters lamented about how Western interviewers are seemingly unable to ask the same kind of rigorous questions to their subjects. Some wondered why a Chinese woman was the one to ask philosophical questions about Greece, while others asked if Western institutions are still teaching students humanities and the classics.

To be fair, Zhuge was educated in the Western system. She has been studying in the US since high school, lectured at Boston College and Brandeis University, and translated books by Hannah Arendt and Plutarch (an ancient Greek philosopher) into Chinese. She lives in Boston for most of the year. Her academic work draws on Straussianism, an influential school of conservative political philosophy that has shaped the thinking of people like Peter Thiel. Her fame in China, which earned her the opportunity to talk to Nolan in the first place, is mostly tied to the way she can succinctly explain the American political system, though some critics think her own conservative ideological leanings show up often in her work.

“She was trained in American conservatism, so the questions she asked really resonated with the US’s educated public,” says Chenchen Zhang, an associate professor in international relations at Durham University. When the familiar insecurities of American conservatives came out of the mouth of a Chinese woman, the audience instantly believed “this is how China views the Western civilization,” Zhang says.

The internet’s reaction to Zhuge’s interview reminds me of “Chinamaxxing,” the meme that persisted through the first half of 2026 on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The trend was promoted mostly by left-leaning, Gen-Z Americans trying to numb their anxiety about America’s decline by deliberately endorsing China and Chinese culture. Now, right-leaning Americans are indulging in the same kinds of worries by fawning over Zhuge’s reverence for the classics. They are really two sides of the same coin.

Defending Herself

As the American right rushed to claim Zhuge as one of its own, the far left moved to distance itself from her. On X, @zei_squirrel, a prominent but anonymous progressive account with 346,000 followers, called her either “a deranged fanatical neocon Zionist lunatic” or a Chinese state-media psy-op, pointing to the fact that Zhuge follows several conservative figures.

Zhuge says she’s no stranger to people across the political spectrum being mad at her. “In China, I try very hard to remain above the fray of the mob rather than let public controversy determine what I think or discuss.” she says. “The labels may differ across countries, but the vulgar human impulse to sort people into political camps is universal.”

As for the anonymous account’s claim that she is a Zionist, Zhuge posted one rebuttal on X but says she won’t engage further. “An account that searches through someone’s following list for Jewish names is not conducting any meaningful analysis,” she says, “This mentality is one reason American online public life has become so polarized. People no longer examine arguments; they investigate affiliations.”

Still, this brief moment of virality has clearly shaken her. In her most recent podcast episode published on Thursday, Zhuge talked about how this was the first time she truly felt that she became the subject of public discourse. There’s a not-so-subtle hint of rage in her tone, and the audience seemed to notice it too. One commenter noted that she had forgotten to say her signature farewell message at the end. Instead, she ended the podcast episode by playing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, which the composer dedicated to heroes. “I would rather listen to how revolution collided with destiny in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony than a bunch of people in my notifications speculating who was my puppeteer pulling the strings,” she said.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.