I once saw a video made a Malaysian woman who said that we should not place too much hope on the next generation. Nobody knows us after the third generation. Most of us will never become famous and be remembered after we’re gone. Even famous Chinese movie stars from my generation are unknown to most youngsters in China.
But strange things happen in the contained and somewhat controlled world of the Chinese internet. Earlier on, we had goalkeeper Hassan being crowned 门神 for the weirdest possible reasons and just as I expected, Hassan had very wisely retired from football and capitalised on the madness.
I wonder if China would still remember him as 门神 in 10 or even 3 years’ time. But Interestingly, some heroes, accidental or otherwise, get resurrected for no apparent reason.
Then, there’s that old and forgotten song 兰花草 which suddenly got revived and earned its reviver quite a bit of money.
Even more inexplicably, a character who stole the limelight recently is a 1200-year-old person called Huang Chao黄巢 (835-884) . The strange thing about Huang Chao suddenly going viral 1,141 years after his death, is that there were no movies or TV series made of him in recent years.
Huang Chao was a failed scholar and a salt smuggler who started a rebellion during the final days of Tang Dynasty. Actually, he started a rebellion when the Tang empire was still prosperous and powerful but brought it to its knees.
Huang Chao was best known as a mass murderer who slaughtered millions and prepared food out of corpses to feed his army. Marching into the capital of Changan, he slaughtered the 5 families and 7 clans who were the elite at that time. All the highest positions of the land and the most profitable businesses were once reserved for these 5 families and 7 clans. Everyone else was shut out. The An Lu Shan rebellion (755-763) was merely a blip in Tang history. The Li family quickly regained control and restored the old order. The Tang Dynasty was still prosperous and powerful after that. It was Huang Chao’s rebellion that dealt a devastating blow that would put the Tang Dynasty on the path of irreversible decline.
After failing as a scholar, Huang Chao wanted to trade salt legally, but he could never get the permit as he had no connections. In 875, at the age of 55, Huang Chao started an armed rebellion and gained many followers. They didn’t just include peasants but highly talented failed scholars as well. After numerous failures that led to many indiscriminate killings which might have resulted in the death of some 8 million people, he finally succeeded in capturing Luoyang and Changan in 880. He went on to slaughter the 5 families and 7 clans. After Huang Chao’ heinous deed, the once prosperous Tang Dynasty was practically destroyed with remnant loyalists setting up a new capital in Chengdu . In Changan, Huang Chao declared himself emperor of Qi. He might not have totally destroyed the Tang Dynasty himself, but he certainly paved the way for its ultimate destruction. So how did Huang Chao suddenly go viral on contained and controlled Chinese internet?
In mid-April 2025, a letter went viral on Chinese internet. It was apparently written by a woman accusing her very accomplished husband, China-Japan Friendship Hospital surgeon Xiao Fei, of cheating on her with a junior doctor by the name of Dong Xiying.
Xiao was also reportedly left an unconscious, anaesthetised patient lying on the operating table while he stepped into an altercation to defend Dong against a colleague who had criticised her. Yes, he had endangered the patient’s life to attend to a private squabble. There was no way to cover up the matter and a public outcry followed.
On 27 April 2025, the hospital announced that it would fire Xiao after finding the accusations in the letter to be true. However, this did not quell public anger as netizens discovered more irregularities concerning Xiao Fei’s lover, female doctor Dong Xiying.
Internet sleuths revealed that Dong did not have a medical background. Instead, she was an economics graduate who switched to medicine via Peking Union Medical College’s experimental “4+4” programme, which allows graduates of non-medical disciplines to complete Doctor of Medicine studies and a shortened residency to just four years.
The US-style programme was launched by the college in 2018. At that time, college president Wang Chen said the idea was to break through the previous limitations of medical education and recruit multidisciplinary talent.
After the scandal broke, many had doubts about this programme, and wondered whether a four-year medical education programme was adequate. A doctor was quoted by Yicai news as saying that, “Medicine requires the accumulation of experience. You may have talent but … you can’t rely solely on talent to solve practical clinical problems.”
The strong reactions from the public may have also been provoked by the silence from the authorities. While the hospital has fired Xiao and the National Health Commission announced that it would thoroughly investigate matters involving Xiao, Dong and related institutions, there has not been any updates since.
In spite of the practice working well in other countries, many netizens were also extremely sceptical of the 4+4 system because of the deep-seated issues of nepotism and corruption in Chinese society. Netizens suspected that Dong’s family must have pulled strings to get her into her current position. It was later revealed that Dong’s mother was the vice principal at another university. Her father is a senior executive at a state owned enterprise. One of her research papers is also very similar to one published by her aunt’s student. In response to these allegations, the university quickly removed Dong’s profile from its website.
A joke went viral on Chinese social media. A sick man infected with a virus confesses that he had pulled strings to get himself admitted to the hospital. The doctor replies, “I also got in through the back door”. The assistant surgeon adds, “Me too.”. Finally, the virus speaks up and asks: “Am I the only one who made it here on my own merits?”
Many versions of that joke were created from that concept.
Back to Huang Chao. Perhaps, this was just one of the many triggers for the revival of Huang Chao. In recent years, short films with the “revenge” theme were highly popular on Chinese internet. These stories usually begin with a poor chap being bullied or spurned by his girlfriend. Years later, he returns home a tycoon and it’s payback time. The Chinese public love such stories and hence, they fantasize about a modern Huang Chao who could cut through all the legal crap and destroy the broken system with a bulldozer. Huang Chao might have failed to root out the Tang loyalists completely, but he inspired large numbers of rebels who would eventually pave the way for a new age in China.
