But not long after, many petty bourgeoisie online began mocking and ridiculing Zhang Xuefeng. They took pleasure in his death and satirized his remarks. This “opinion leader,” once praised as someone who dared to tell the truth and helped students from “grassroots” and lower-income families rise upward, seemed overnight to become a clown in people’s eyes. Some indulged in all kinds of vulgar amusement to mock Zhang Xuefeng; some simply hated his past words and positions; others tried to defend Zhang Xuefeng and angrily denounced his critics as morally corrupt. People of different classes, standing on different class positions, have different views of Zhang Xuefeng. The shift in public opinion about Zhang Xuefeng is a good thing; for this bourgeois figure, superficial attacks are better than any lofty praise. However, the petty bourgeoisie cannot criticize Zhang Xuefeng scientifically with Marxism. Their criticisms are inconsistent, uncoordinated, and full of internal disputes. Some say his merits still outweigh his faults; others reduce his mistakes to a few remarks and cobble together some achievements for him. What kind of person was Zhang Xuefeng, really? Did he truly do any “good” for the people? These questions can only be made clear through Marxist analysis.
Let’s first open up Zhang Xuefeng’s rise to wealth and see what it looks like.
Zhang Xuefeng’s original name was Zhang Zhibiao. He was born in 1984 in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang, and his father was a railway worker. In the senior high school entrance exam, he ranked 16th in the county and was admitted to a key high school. Even then he had a strong speculative mindset and wanted to climb upward through academic competition to obtain a high degree. When he ranked 350th in the school in a monthly exam, he could not accept it:
I can’t let my teacher hold my photo and say to every newly enrolled kid: “Look, this person was once 16th in the county, but then because of this and that, his grades plummeted, and in the end he ended up with a miserable fate.” … Is that going to be my outcome in the end? I can’t accept that outcome. I want to work hard. I want to get into a good university! I must go to university!
Zhang Zhibiao was admitted to Zhengzhou University with a county ranking of 60th. In 2007 he entered the graduate exam consulting industry, and in 2008 he transformed himself into “Zhang Xuefeng.” He took to university lecture halls as a master’s graduate of Tsinghua University.[1] Zhang Xuefeng did not stop there; at times he also presented himself as a Tsinghua professor or a Guanghua graduate from Peking University when lecturing in front of students.[2]
Why did Zhang Zhibiao turn himself into the highly educated Zhang Xuefeng? The customers of the graduate exam consulting industry are petty bourgeoisie who, under capitalism, desperately want to climb upward. They likewise choose lecturers and institutions according to their knowledge capital. Zhang Xuefeng had to rely on deception and image-building, creating a highly educated persona to deceive students in order to make money. It is clear that from the very beginning he was by no means, as the bourgeoisie boasts, someone who deeply cared for students and taught purely out of concern. On the contrary, from the very start he entered this industry with the intent of making money.
By the end of May 2016, Zhang Xuefeng became wildly popular online thanks to a lecture video about choosing graduate exam institutions and majors; the video surpassed 10 million views within 48 hours, and its total later exceeded one billion. The company he founded earlier that year also began attracting attention; his Weibo account was launched, and he started writing books and publishing them, gaining considerable fame. But he did not stop at graduate exam training and instead expanded into the college entrance exam application-filling field. In 2021, he moved to Suzhou and founded Fengxue Weilai Education Technology Co., Ltd., whose main business was college entrance exam application services, and he also began frequent livestreams and call-ins to explain application-filling issues. It was through this process that Zhang Xuefeng gained wider recognition, and countless media outlets praised him both before and after his death.
Those who support Zhang Xuefeng always say that he broke down the information barriers between further education and employment, “helped the poor fight for fairness,” and “distributed information originally available only to a few to the majority of ordinary people,” helping many “lower-class,” “poor-family,” and “ordinary” families get into good majors and change their fate. They also say Zhang Xuefeng dared to tell the truth and praise him as a hero for the people:
“He is an ‘oddity’ who tells the truth, a sincere spokesperson for students from poor families, and possesses a rare childlike sincerity in the internet age.”[3]
“Such a persona of ‘daring to tell the truth’ allowed him to rise step by step from a graduate exam tutor to a super influencer with more than 40 million followers.”[4]
“A breaker who fought for the right of countless ordinary people to know about educational resources.[5]
“A ‘hero’ who dares to expose the emperor’s new clothes.”[6]
So let’s take a look at what kind of “hero” Zhang Xuefeng is!
First of all, the application consulting fees he sells are extremely expensive. During the 2024 college entrance exam season, Zhang Xuefeng launched two versions of Gaokao application services in his livestream room: the 11,999 yuan Dream Card and the 17,999 yuan Fulfillment Card. This is by no means something “ordinary families” can afford. Clearly, only a small number of petty bourgeoisie, as well as labor aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, can afford to “fulfill their dreams” in this way. Just by setting prices, Zhang Xuefeng already keeps the working masses out. Second, Zhang Xuefeng is by no means the kind of person the bourgeoisie claims—a Prometheus-like figure with the spirit of stealing fire from heaven and giving it to humanity. When a parent in his livestream tried to ask him for advice through a call-in, Zhang Xuefeng asked whether they were paying him money: “If you’re not paying, then don’t call in”[7]. In another livestream he said: “I’ll say it again, parents, really, don’t expect to use a free call-in in the livestream to complete a service that normally we charge around 10,000 yuan for…”[8] He by no means gives this “information” to the people for free; on the contrary, is there even the slightest sympathy for ordinary families in this?
In the bourgeois evaluation, Zhang Xuefeng seems to have single-handedly broken through resistance from academia, universities, and even the revisionist government in order to expose the truth of the industry. In livestream consultations he said that if a child insisted on applying for journalism, he would definitely knock them unconscious. He disparaged some universities, saying “Harbin Institute of Technology is a pile of crap,” and discouraged applicants from applying to Southwest University. He was pessimistic, saying that liberal arts are all service industries, that “the whole service industry can be summed up in one word: ‘licking boots’”; and that if you don’t take the civil service exam in liberal arts, you’ll end up as a salesperson. These remarks drew opposition from some universities, and in September 2025 he was even briefly banned across platforms by the revisionist state. He also once said with a serious face in a livestream, “My line of work isn’t easy. I’ve offended too many people’s interests”[9]. But from what position did he speak these “truths”? Take his “liberal arts are a service industry” claim: liberal arts is a general term for “humanities and social sciences.” As ideology, it is part of the superstructure. In capitalist society, it can only be bourgeois ideology, and intellectuals in the related disciplines are, in essence, serving the bourgeoisie—serving money. But is he opposing this? No. He points this out only to say that being a lackey for the bourgeoisie may be uncomfortable and may not pay enough. What he most encourages is people becoming the bourgeoisie’s lackeys. In regard to liberal arts, he especially recommends “law, accounting, and Chinese language,” calling them the “seven-character mantra,” “because these three majors are big civil-service exam feeders.”[10] Clearly, in his view, becoming a civil servant in the revisionist system and living off the surplus value extracted by the revisionists from the whole country is also a kind of success. This kind of “truth” merely teaches people to submit to capitalism and look for places to take advantage within it.
Zhang Xuefeng has no fundamental conflict of interest with other bourgeoisie. Whenever he encounters resistance from the bourgeoisie, he quickly bows his head. When his liberal-arts-as-service-industry theory was criticized, he immediately apologized and said liberal arts had great potential; when the revisionists banned him, he promptly adjusted himself. And there is no fundamental conflict of interest between the revisionists and Zhang Xuefeng. Their crackdown on him was only because they did not want the content of his speech to be too naked, thereby damaging the revisionists’ beautification of the education system. It is a case of giving a small rebuke in order to help them more. Since what Zhang Xuefeng promotes is reckless speculation in the Gaokao to achieve class mobility, without opposing the bourgeois system itself, this opportunistic, self-serving philosophy of rising through speculation can also buy off a small handful of petty bourgeoisie and turn them into revisionist lackeys, making them support capitalism desperately for the sake of their parasitic position. That is fully beneficial to the revisionist bureaucratic-monopoly bourgeoisie in maintaining its rule. The revisionists also fully accepted Zhang Xuefeng as a bourgeois figure and made him one of the ruling class of capitalist China. On January 9, 2023, he was elected as a deputy to the Jiangsu Provincial People’s Congress, offering advice and proposals in the interests of capitalists.
What kind of people support Zhang Xuefeng? And why has he been able to rely on these people to reap both fame and status? This must still be analyzed from the entire social system.
Since China restored capitalism, the revisionist bourgeoisie destroyed the revolutionary achievements in education made during socialist China, restored the college entrance exam selection system, canceled university reforms, and destroyed the achievements of the Cultural Revolution that allowed workers and peasants to attend university and educated youth to go to the countryside to participate in labor reform, all in order to narrow the gap between mental and manual labor and eliminate bourgeois rights. By widening this gap, the bourgeoisie used the bourgeois education system to divide the masses, turning the children of laboring people into wage slaves while also cultivating a group of intellectuals obedient to their rule. In the capitalist market, the level of education acquired a corresponding commodity price. Highly educated intellectuals had the opportunity to escape manual labor, divide up a portion of surplus value from the hands of the bourgeoisie, and live a comfortable life. The restored capitalist relations of production produced large numbers of petty bourgeoisie who feared bankruptcy and longed to make speculative fortunes, as well as labor aristocrats who hoped to preserve their private property status. The ideas of private ownership, Confucian thought, and other reactionary ideologies in revisionist society also corrode the working class. “Since parents in private-property families regard their children as part of their own property, they naturally want the greatest possible return on that property. Thus, under the banner of ‘thinking for their children’s future,’ they do everything possible to intensify oppression of their children, hoping that the stock in their hands will rise to a high price.”[11] Parents in private-property families place their speculative hopes on the path of their children obtaining high degrees through academic exams. It is precisely in such a society that a fully unproductive industry like tutoring and consulting for middle school entrance exams, Gaokao, graduate exams, and so on exists. It is precisely on such a social basis that Zhang Xuefeng can sell his application consulting services at monopoly prices and make a huge fortune.
Monopoly price is a special form of price. For commodities whose production conditions are special, enabling their producers to monopolize the production of that commodity, the price can take the form of monopoly price. (…) Monopoly price is determined neither by value nor by production price, the transformed form of value, but by the buyer’s purchasing power and willingness to buy.[12]
In capitalist society, knowledge has become private property. Today there is even such a thing as “intellectual property” in the revisionist system, and the bourgeoisie can, through monopolizing knowledge, give its material carrier the attributes of a commodity with monopoly pricing. Facts have also shown that Zhang Xuefeng has been quite active in monopolizing knowledge. In December 2023, Fengxue Weilai announced a patent for “a method and system for recommending university admission information.” The system provides an algorithm that can automatically predict university admission cutoffs and then recommend universities according to a candidate’s score, and can be used in Fengxue Weilai’s application-filling software and internal consulting tools.[13] But monopolizing one or two algorithms is not enough, because there are many companies in the market that also operate application-filling services. Zhang Xuefeng’s own reputation and status in the application-filling industry, built through炒作 in the past, also play a role. “Monopoly price is formed when the seller monopolizes the conditions of sale of the commodity.” The admissions policies, admission data, and university information Zhang Xuefeng uses are probably mostly public. But if others do not buy in, they cannot directly obtain the full set of application services backed by Zhang Xuefeng’s own reputation and Fengxue Weilai. It is precisely this monopoly position that allows Zhang Xuefeng to brazenly say “If you’re not paying, then don’t call in,” and “Don’t expect to use a free call-in in the livestream to complete a service that normally we charge around 10,000 yuan for…” Monopoly price is determined by the buyer’s purchasing power and willingness to buy. Since parents in private-property families treat their children as speculative private assets and hope to cash in through high education, they naturally believe the line that the Gaokao determines one’s life and treat the exam and application process as the top priority. They are also extremely worshipful of Zhang Xuefeng himself and his company brand, believing in his judgment about majors and believing that the service guaranteed by his reputation can help their children speculate successfully. And most of them are labor aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and other exploiting classes, which means they can purchase Zhang Xuefeng’s application services with surplus value obtained through exploitation. Their purchasing power and willingness to buy determine that Zhang Xuefeng can set a high price for his application services and still, after costs, obtain monopoly profits.
From this monopoly pricing we can also see what kind of enterprise Zhang Xuefeng runs. Since it sells services to labor aristocrats and the bourgeoisie through monopoly pricing, the monopoly superprofits it obtains also come entirely from the surplus value of these exploiting classes. A small number of petty bourgeoisie and an almost negligible number of proletarians, if they buy such services due to their relatively strong private-property mindset, then the former are handing over part of their own labor, while the latter are further spending part of the value of their labor power, making their living situation even worse. “Thus, exploitation actually takes place in the process of commodity circulation, and the principle of equivalent exchange is broken”[12:1]—this in fact reflects the decay of capitalism in the imperialist era. Whether Zhang Xuefeng’s employees are serving customers, developing systems, or arranging courses, they are in fact mental laborers. They do not create material wealth, do not create value, and are engaged in unproductive labor. Their wages come from a portion of surplus value taken from the exploiting classes. Of course, Zhang Xuefeng is also in a relationship of oppression and being oppressed with them: he does not need to serve tens of thousands of parents himself; as a bourgeois he can occupy the largest share of surplus value. Therefore, his remarks lamenting how hard he works are extremely shameless. No matter how hard a bourgeois’s exploitation may be, it is all for the sake of obtaining more profit. This kind of mental labor in application services is completely useless to humanity. Labor that serves parents in private-property families in helping their children speculate can only function to maintain capitalist rule and help a group of people become exploiters and their lackeys. It can by no means help ordinary families obtain fairness; it can only help parents in private-property families “fulfill their dreams.” The existence of this industry is fundamentally the result of the decay of capitalism in the imperialist era.
If one thinks that Zhang Xuefeng himself or his company truly possesses some miracle formula or secret recipe for application decisions that justifies such high prices, that would be a serious mistake. It is true that due to the gap between mental and manual labor, Zhang Xuefeng and his company employees have greater advantages in collecting this kind of application information. But some parents and teachers can also do similar things. More importantly, under capitalism there is no secret recipe that can keep people stable and secure for long. “Bourgeois economics can neither stop the overall crisis nor prevent individual capitalists from loss, debt, and bankruptcy, nor individual workers from unemployment and poverty. It is still the same now: man proposes, God disposes (that is, the domination of the alien forces of the capitalist mode of production)”[14]. Those bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats who have the economic means to spend more than ten thousand yuan on Zhang Xuefeng’s services naturally have the means to let their children attend better schools in big cities, hire expensive private tutors, and attend cram schools. Their children can speculate successfully in academics first and foremost because of their family’s economic position. By contrast, the vast majority of petty bourgeois students are in a precarious situation under capitalism. Zhang Xuefeng’s application advice cannot possibly allow everyone to achieve “mobility.” On the contrary, we already know that Zhang Xuefeng is a liar. In his early years he built himself up through false credentials, and deception and unverified statements are routine for him. Some of his major recommendations have now become a laughingstock among the petty bourgeoisie. Taking the most famous example, “choose civil engineering,” Zhang Xuefeng later defended himself by saying he never recommended civil engineering as a major, only offered personalized advice to the person asking. But according to reports:
It turns out that Zhang Xuefeng, like other bourgeoisie, also viewed the future through an extremely vulgar lens, one that beautified capitalism as a prosperous age of peace and prosperity. The revisionist bureaucratic-monopoly bourgeoisie, by implementing Keynesianism and expanding the fiscal deficit to invest in the public sphere, forcibly created a scene of “prosperity” for the real estate industry. The boom in real estate once created a huge market for steel, cement, and construction capital, and expanded demand for labor in the civil engineering sector; but it only delayed China’s already severe overproduction and instead further expanded production. It relied on massive borrowing and on the masses continually going into debt to buy homes. But housing prices and debt further weakened the consumption capacity of the working people. The pandemic since 2020 has made the masses’ lives even more miserable, and the revisionists’ large-scale public investment again brought no prosperity:Some netizens found a video Zhang Xuefeng posted in July 2020. In the video, he strongly recommended civil engineering to Gaokao students. His reason was that China had been engaged in urbanization, rural people were moving into the cities, urban residents were making more and more money, and there was a demand for improved housing. As a result, real estate would develop, and studying civil engineering would mean more employment opportunities.[15]
“… The so-called ‘free’ vaccines and nucleic acid tests, even when spread across every Chinese person, amounted to nearly 20,000 yuan, emptying the last cent from the pockets of the working people. Nominal wages continued to fall, unemployment became normal, forcing the working people to keep living by eating tomorrow’s grain today. The Chinese people, already burdened with debt, took on even heavier debt. In just three years of the pandemic, the already sky-high total household debt increased by another 53%! Even if infants and students with no income are counted, each Chinese person has taken on at least 60,000 yuan in debt. … The final result is that the working people are plunged into extreme hardship, intensifying to an unprecedented degree in human history the contradiction between the tendency of capitalist production to expand without limit and the shrinking of the working people’s effective demand.”[16]
It is precisely the extreme sharpness of the basic contradiction of capitalism, combined with the fact that the masses under heavy exploitation cannot afford the high housing prices, that caused China’s real estate crisis to fully erupt after the pandemic. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2020 the country’s new housing construction area was still about 2.244 billion square meters, down only 1.2%; by 2022, the new construction area had fallen 39.4%; and in 2024 it fell another 23.0%[17]. After the expansion of real estate and infrastructure halted, the demand for labor from construction capital shrank sharply, and the supply of mental laborers related to the civil engineering industry naturally also became severely excessive. Students who entered civil engineering after listening to Zhang Xuefeng’s advice in 2020 regretted it during the 2024 graduation season and called civil engineering a “bottomless pit” major. At this point, Zhang Xuefeng could still smile and talk about the renaming of civil engineering majors today. Faced with criticism, he firmly denied ever recommending civil engineering and instead retorted, “Has your intelligence been eaten by a dog?” Zhang Xuefeng’s refusal to admit fault and his counterattack in the form of insulting the deceived are precisely one reason why many petty bourgeoisie shifted from supporting him to hating him.
It is clear that Zhang Xuefeng has no real ability; the body of knowledge he possesses, apart from helping him obtain monopoly superprofits, cannot possibly enable the broad masses to change their exploited condition under capitalism. Zhang Xuefeng is not an isolated case. In 2023, there were already more than 2,600 companies in China related to application-filling services[18], and the industry’s total revenue reached tens of billions. These companies are all much the same as Zhang Xuefeng: they all exploit the reactionary system of the imperialist era to reap monopoly superprofits. According to reports by revisionist official media, these institutions are often expensive, and their consultants, like Zhang Xuefeng, engage in packaging and deception. Their training content is about creating personas and polishing resumes; a planner with 12 years of experience said that when answering inquiries, they relied on AI. Some companies even collaborate with schools to profit by introducing students to self-study undergraduate degrees: “In the contract we signed with another school, you get a 20,000-yuan commission for each student,” and the person in charge bluntly said, “We have no industry初心, or even moral standards.”[19]
Marx and Engels, when criticizing capitalism in The Communist Manifesto, said: “… it has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value.” The chaos in the application-filling industry precisely reflects the extreme selfishness of the bourgeoisie. In China, the ability of the application-filling industry to set such exorbitant monopoly prices and make huge profits relies on the decadent system of imperialism, first and foremost the reactionary education system of the revisionists. This special service industry, feeding on surplus value, is completely a poisonous tumor parasitic on society!
Let us return to Zhang Xuefeng himself. If we merely remember him as a bourgeois who profited in one way or another, that is still far from enough; Zhang Xuefeng’s social status under the revisionist system inevitably makes him completely reactionary politically. First and foremost, he strongly identifies with China’s Confucian ideology and feudal parental authority. Since most of his clients and supporters are private-property-family households, he must also defend the interests of these feudal parents.
Feudal parents naturally regard the children they raise with effort and money as their own property, and thus demand unlimited ownership and control over this private property; this is the economic root of China’s distorted feudal parental-authority ideology.[11:1]
Since, in Confucian thought, children are the private property of their parents, parental decisions about children are absolutely correct. No matter how tyrannical or brutal the parents are, the children can only be grateful. Zhang Xuefeng once angrily said: “He may not understand, he may use the wrong method, but you cannot question the original intention of parents making every consideration for their children! … As a child, you cannot question our original intention in making this decision for you!” Those who complain that their parents treat them badly, “people like that can never do well. Why? Because they don’t know how to be grateful; they don’t even remember the kindness of their own biological parents in raising them”[20]. Since children are the private property of their parents, if this stock does not willingly appreciate in value, then it is the parents’ misfortune. There was a student who scored over 200 on the Gaokao and said in Zhang Xuefeng’s livestream that he “didn’t want to keep grinding anymore.” Zhang Xuefeng said, “What kind of sins did this parent commit in a previous life?” and then said that if you don’t want to grind, then go taste the hardship of life: go carry bricks at a construction site, go cut vegetables in a restaurant, and don’t regret it later. He even directly used the phrase “you’ve ruined this account” to describe some children to their parents, openly treating children like game accounts and viewing them as parents’ private property. If this private property has low grades, then it is just a useless low-value commodity.[21][22]
Standing on the side of the revisionist bourgeoisie, Zhang Xuefeng defends this Confucian hierarchy and thus uses hierarchy to attack the broad masses of laborers who create material wealth as despicable. In one of his books he wrote the following:
I strongly recommend that parents do the following with their children.
Every slightly larger city has four such places: bus stations, railway stations, high-speed rail stations, and airports. Take your children to visit these four places and experience them. Let them look at the clothing, speech, and temperament of most people who take buses, then at those who take ordinary trains and those who take high-speed rail, and finally at those who take planes, especially the temperament and speech of people in first class. I’m not discriminating against anyone here, please don’t misunderstand. But when we shout that everyone is equal, are the people in these four places really equal? In some respects, perhaps not. Everyone lives differently. When some people are thinking about which car to buy next, when some are thinking about which country to take a spontaneous trip to, others may be thinking about how to transfer from bus to subway to save two yuan, and some are thinking about skipping breakfast to save a few yuan.
In a certain sense, Zhang Xuefeng really does dare to say “the truth.” He openly and crudely admits that in capitalist society the situation of the working people and the exploiting classes is “unfair,” while singing praises to the bourgeoisie. In his eyes, laborers are thoroughly exploited under capitalism and their clothing and speech are lowly, while the bourgeoisie that can enjoy the freedom to buy cars, the freedom to travel, and squander surplus value at will are noble. He fully endorses this bourgeois hierarchy and takes pride in becoming an exploiting class himself. He firmly denies that the problems of capitalism are caused by exploitation, and says the proletariat’s low living conditions are only because they “don’t work hard enough.” Regarding the high housing prices in revisionist society and the plunder of the people, he sneers: “People complaining online that houses are too expensive are just people who can’t afford to buy them, because those who can afford to buy are all working hard,” and then he makes no attempt to conceal his worship and admiration for those exploiting-class people who can “afford sports cars” and live in “high-end neighborhoods,” admiring their “money-making” ability. “When you are thinking about why this society is so unfair to me… well, the fact that they can afford to buy a house and you can’t is normal”[23]. Such a social Darwinist who promotes the logic of the law of the jungle, defending the capitalist system of exploitation with naked bandit logic—could he possibly be someone who fights for the rights of ordinary people and the people?
As a bourgeois figure, Zhang Xuefeng is bound to beautify the capitalist class in wage labor relations and do everything possible to excuse capitalist exploitation. In a variety show he once said he “very much dislikes employees who ask about the five insurances and one housing fund,” believing such people “have no future.” What he hates most is when people ask, “Does our company have overtime pay?” Only “those who give themselves to the company” can talk about overtime. A company “having to keep doing overtime means it is flourishing.”[24] Clearly, in Zhang Xuefeng’s eyes, a capitalist is normal only if he desperately increases the exploitation rate by docking wages and extending working hours.
Since Zhang Xuefeng stands on the side of the bourgeoisie, he will inevitably support China’s biggest bourgeoisie—the bureaucratic-monopoly bourgeoisie itself. In the past, Nazi Germany and its leader Hitler sought a theoretical basis for the aggressive expansion of monopoly capital in Social Darwinist theory. Zhang Xuefeng is likewise a fanatical fascist. He supports the revisionist regime’s imperialist aggression and expansion. When the revisionist bureaucratic-bourgeois clique held the “September 3” fascist military parade, Zhang Xuefeng arranged for company employees to watch the live broadcast together to strengthen fascist ideological education. After the broadcast ended, he declared in front of all employees: “The day the guns start firing, I’ll donate at least 50 million, and my company account will always have that money… overall I’ll donate at least 100 million—fucking national reunification, our generation will definitely succeed, I always believe that!” As a fascist, Zhang Xuefeng is utterly impatient for aggression and expansion![25]
The bourgeoisie and feudal parents supporting and mourning Zhang Xuefeng is no surprise, because Zhang Xuefeng represents their interests. But among the mourners there was one person whose grief was especially intense: the one whose real name is Ren Chonghao, the “Ma Director,” “Ma Qianzhu,” who runs “Sleep News” on Bilibili. At the end of the video “【Sleep News 1034】The Short-seller Master Zhang Xuefeng: The Must-have Item of 2035,” Ma Director shamelessly quoted the ending of Mao’s “Serve the People” and praised Zhang Xuefeng for “making contributions to the people.”[26]
Why would such an utterly reactionary fellow, who occasionally enjoys wrapping himself in Marxist phrasing, praise Zhang Xuefeng? Because Ma Director essentially adheres to a bourgeois reformist line. At times he seems to say some sharp-sounding things and criticize certain social realities, but he fundamentally does not oppose the revisionist bureaucratic capitalist system. On the contrary, he gives a little rebuke while also helping, attempting to use this reformist image to win the masses’ trust and curry favor with the revisionist bureaucratic bourgeoisie in order to obtain an officially sanctioned position as an opinion leader. Naturally, he would not oppose the bourgeois Zhang Xuefeng. Ma Director himself admitted that after he supported Zhang Xuefeng’s liberal arts service-industry theory, the two, both in Suzhou, became “offline friends.”
Ma Director admits that China’s education system has problems and is “harmful,” but he believes the problems lie only in issues such as social resource allocation, publicly funded universities being idle and ineffective, and obstruction by “interest groups.” He praises Zhang Xuefeng for shorting China’s “specific interest groups” and doing dangerous work that “offends people,” saying he dares to “say bad things” and can “persuade some families to face reality.” He admits that “Zhang Xuefeng doesn’t criticize class contradictions,” yet he says Zhang Xuefeng’s views on “ordinary families” and “middle-class” families “subjectively reduce resource misallocation, and objectively maintain social stability. The Ministry of Social Work should award Zhang Xuefeng a great medal.” So maintaining the stability of capitalist society and correctly matching resources is also a form of serving the people! He said: “I hope the relevant departments do not ignore Zhang Xuefeng, and even less suppress him. The only thing they should do is seriously study the social environment that pushed Zhang Xuefeng to the forefront and correctly formulate education reform plans.”
In a word, Ma Director does not want revolution; he wants reform. By praising Zhang Xuefeng, he is actually praising himself. On one hand he speaks Marxist phrases, and on the other he calls Zhang Xuefeng’s livestream question-and-answer sessions “heavy physical labor,” and, in sympathy, says that his own frequent livestreaming is also “heavy physical labor” and very tiring. In Ma Director’s eyes, Zhang Xuefeng, this capitalist, seems to have become a hero burning himself out at a combat post until the final moment: “No one on the whole team can replace him… so his team of several hundred people can only have him come out and build the brand image. I visited his office, and that day happened to be his designated day off. The office floor was empty, with only him maintaining combat readiness, ready to livestream at any time.”
He admires this capitalist with a bourgeois heroism of history, but in fact he is also boasting about himself as a hero of speaking on behalf of the people. Reformists like Ma Director want both to appear to criticize current affairs and injustice in order to deceive the masses, and to gain the status and reputation of the bourgeoisie and live off exploitation. When he uses “Serve the People” to praise Zhang Xuefeng, isn’t he at the same time praising himself? Ma Director, who behaves as if he and this reactionary are people serving the people, is indulging in wishful thinking! Ma Director, looking as though he had suffered a bereavement, says that Chinese society losing Zhang Xuefeng means losing someone who dared to say bad things, someone who would affect resource allocation and widen the gap in education, and says he could have made the greatest contribution to China… In fact, the opposite is true: losing Zhang Xuefeng is a tremendous good thing.
Just as people like Ma Director were mourning Zhang Xuefeng, and shortly after the tens of thousands in Suzhou bid farewell to Zhang Xuefeng’s body, a wave of mockery and opposition to Zhang Xuefeng surged online, and Zhang Xuefeng’s death instantly turned from a bereavement into a cause for celebration. Why?
The main opponents of Zhang Xuefeng are some petty bourgeoisie and students. Now, as revisionist society grows darker and the unemployment crisis becomes severe, the path to obtaining a stable life through academic speculation has become extremely dim, while students still have to endure the dictatorship and oppression of feudal parents and old-school authorities at home and in school. Zhang Xuefeng represents the revisionist position, presenting everything as natural and justified. As the mouthpiece of parents and schools, he denies all resistance and uses the perspective of commodity prices to belittle students in many majors. The merciless oppression of capitalist reality has caused many petty bourgeoisie to no longer believe in the rhetoric that “studying changes your fate.” Faced with the collapse of the speculative path to wealth, they feel particularly dissatisfied with the capitalist law-of-the-jungle, survival-of-the-fittest society Zhang Xuefeng promotes. For this reason, many people, driven by a spirit of revenge, mock Zhang Xuefeng’s corpse, satirize his reactionary remarks in every possible way, and treat his death as a joke.
The core of the petty bourgeois worldview is individualism, which means most of them criticize Zhang Xuefeng out of personal dissatisfaction and revenge. Some have a strong anarchist streak; their mockery of Zhang Xuefeng overlaps with the kind of morally degenerate hell jokes people make. Precisely because of individualism, many petty bourgeoisie do not oppose capitalism itself. They often attack Zhang Xuefeng from the logic of equivalent exchange, with the most typical example being criticism that he once recommended civil engineering but now civil engineering has poor employment prospects, yet he flatly denies it. This point was mentioned earlier. But this petty bourgeois attack stems from their dissatisfaction that Zhang Xuefeng cannot really enable them to live a stable and comfortable life in capitalist society through one major alone. The civil engineering positions Zhang Xuefeng referred to are also not construction workers laboring under the scorching sun, but mental laborers who can sit in air-conditioned offices. Therefore, the petty bourgeoisie are dissatisfied with Zhang Xuefeng, yet they themselves are unwilling to accept the proletarian position. Many of them still harbor fantasies of climbing upward to become exploiting classes, still imagining that through the Gaokao selection process and choosing the right major, they can obtain a good, leisurely job that frees them from the misery of manual labor.
Zhang Xuefeng is of course a liar, and under revisionist capitalist society he is bound to be a liar. But would a non-lying Zhang Xuefeng be any better? In the comment sections related to Zhang Xuefeng’s videos, besides criticism and ridicule, one can sometimes see other people who are grateful to him, saying that they followed his advice back then and now have a good job. Such people do exist, but when they identify with Zhang Xuefeng, they are at the same time identifying with the entire exploitative system of revisionist society. Those who can live a leisurely and comfortable life through academic speculation are either, like Zhang Xuefeng, taking civil service exams and living off the support of the revisionist state, or have become labor aristocrats and bourgeoisie. The lives of these people are all built upon the cruel exploitation of the vast majority of China’s working masses. The petty bourgeoisie’s opposition to Zhang Xuefeng, after all, shows the sharpness of the contradictions in revisionist society, the beginning of the disintegration of bourgeois rule, and the fact that its sermons can no longer convince people. In such an era of increasingly sharp class contradictions, whether to identify with the capitalist system for the sake of a stable life or to transform one’s own private-property mindset and proudly accept proletarian identity, the petty bourgeoisie, as an increasingly divided intermediate class, must make a choice.
The Gaokao selection system may allow a small number of people to achieve so-called class mobility, but it can never liberate the proletariat itself. If the proletariat wants liberation, and if China’s reactionary Confucianism as well as the brutal dictatorship of parents and schools are to be eliminated, then the rule of the bourgeoisie and the entire capitalist society must be overthrown. What the petty bourgeoisie should truly do is not cling desperately to fantasies of a former life, but actively transform themselves in accordance with proletarian demands and join the broad path of socialist revolution.
[1] 一场无声的反抗：中国民众为何哀悼张雪峰 - 纽约时报中文网
[2] 防灾工程系举行考研专题讲座-防灾科技学院教务处（教学评估与建设办公室、创新创业学院）
[3] 聊聊张雪峰的黑历史|考研|高考|网红|研究生|郑州大学|清华大学_网易订阅
[4] 深网快评 | 张雪峰走了，为什么他获得了许多的共情？|川观新闻
[5] 教育之殇．一｜当教育只剩下计算 如何怪张雪峰把焦虑炼成黄金？
[6] 热点透视｜舆论落幕，争议留声：张雪峰，一个时代的教育注脚-新闻与传播研究所
[7] 张雪峰离场：一个教育顶流，和他背后的焦虑时代_腾讯新闻
[8] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1665E6ZEpP/
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[12] 中国未来革命的道路 – 曙光
[13] 【提问】脑力劳动是否创造价值，程序员的收入从何而来？
[14] CN117290610B - 一种高校招生信息推荐方法和系统 - Google Patents
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[16] 四年前选张雪峰推荐专业的大学生咋样了|高考|土木专业|同学|就业|截图_手机新浪网
[17] 凯恩斯主义在中国——兴起、“繁荣”与幻灭 – 曙光
[18] 2020年1—12月份全国房地产开发投资和销售情况 - 国家统计局
[19] 志愿填报“信息战”-中新网
[20] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fEH_VASe175EV7xL149B1A
[21] Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto, PLA Warriors Publishing House, January 1972 edition, p. 26.
[22] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mxCfBQEaJ/
[23] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1gSWLzBEKW/
[24] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1WfPse5ENH/
[25] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1aZXDBcEw7/
[27] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV15kXGBoEUC/
[28] 【睡前消息1034】做空高手张雪峰 2035年的必需品
Engels, Anti-Dühring, People’s Publishing House, December 1970, p. 312 ↩︎
四年前选张雪峰推荐专业的大学生咋样了|高考|土木专业|同学|就业|截图_手机新浪网6utm_source=chatgpt.com ↩︎
