An analysis of the heated discussions surrounding Wang Hongwen on YouTube in the winter of 2025

Figure 1: Wang Hongwen (left) and Mao Zedong (right)

In the later stages of the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao referred to four radical figures in the central leadership as the “Gang of Four.” Among these four was a young political rising star. Before the age of forty, he was favored by Mao and transferred from Shanghai to Beijing, nominally becoming one of the top three political figures in China. His name is Wang Hongwen.

I scraped the titles, publishers, and publication times of almost all the YouTube videos with “Wang Hongwen (in Chinese)” in their titles. Specifically, I used the YouTube API, setting it to scrape a maximum of 50 videos per page and 10,000 page turns. Because the number of videos retrieved varied each time, I used the highest number I’ve obtained so far for the subsequent analysis, approximately 500 videos. Of these 500 videos, about 20 videos do not contain “Wang Hongwen (Chinese)” in their titles, but they will still be returned as search results. I included the titles of these videos in the word frequency analysis, but these videos were not included in the monthly distribution analysis, which will be presented soon.

An “Overnight Success”

After counting and visualizing the number of videos by month, you will see a significant increase in December 2025 (Figure 2). Note that the y-axis is logarithmically transformed. What happened then?

Figure 2: Monthly distribution of the number of YouTube videos with “Wang Hongwen (in Chinese)” in the title

I divided the videos into two time periods: before December 2025 (excluding) and after December 2025 (including); then, a word frequency analysis was conducted on the video titles. Figures 3 and 4 show the most frequently occurring words.

Figure 3: 12 most frequent keywords in the titles of YouTube videos with “Wang Hongwen (in Chinese)” in the title (Before Dec 2025, excluding Dec)

Keywords in English (Descending order): Mao Zedong, Chairman, CR (an abbreviation for the Cultural Revolution), Gang of Four, the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao, CCP, Zhang Chunqiao, Why, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping

Figure 4: 12 most frequent keywords in the titles of YouTube videos with “Wang Hongwen (in Chinese)” in the title (After Dec 2025, including Dec)

Keywords in English (Descending order): Mao Zedong, CR (an abbreviation for the Cultural Revolution), Youth, Ye Jianying, Successor, Gang of Four, history, China, unveiling, CCP, Why, Zhongnanhai.

To explore the differences between these two periods, I removed high-frequency words that appeared in both periods and conducted another word frequency analysis. Figures 5 and 6 show the results of the analysis.

Figure 5: 12 most frequent keywords in the titles of YouTube videos with “Wang Hongwen (in Chinese)” in the title (Before Dec 2025, excluding Dec, excluding common keywords)

Keywords in English (Descending order): Chairman, Jiangqing, the Cultural Revolution, CCP, Zhang Chunqiao, Zhou Enlai, Shanghai, Deng Xiaoping, Xiao Wang (a nickname for Wang Hongwen), China, getting arrested, making people (feel/think/act…)

Figure 6: 12 most frequent keywords in the titles of YouTube videos with “Wang Hongwen (in Chinese)” in the title (Before Dec 2025, excluding Dec, excluding common keywords)

Keywords in English (Descending order): Ye Jianying, Youth, Successor, China, history, unveiling, politics, Zhongnanhai, CCP, tragedy, the truth, chairman

First, the term “Youth” was mentioned significantly more frequently in video titles in December 2025 and thereafter compared to previous years. “Youth” is a film directed by renowned Chinese director Feng Xiaogang. Some mainland netizens believe that the male lead’s appearance in the film bears a striking resemblance to Wang Hongwen in a classic photograph. Although the film was released in 2017, a review video about it was censored from the Chinese version of YouTube, Bilibili, last fall/winter, likely due to the heated discussion surrounding the male lead’s appearance. Our analysis shows that the linkage between the film and Wang Hongwen is mentioned by many videos on YouTube.

Second, while the titles of videos before December 2025 mention Wang together with other well-known political figures (Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping) in his time, the videos from December 2025 onwards frequently frame Wang Hongwen as once Mao Zedong’s chosen successor, with less reference to other political figures.

Last, this memo provides only a very preliminary analysis and therefore has many limitations. One limitation is that the word frequency analysis failed to capture an interesting theme in Wang’s related videos: selecting audio-visual descriptions (that they creators believes) portray his charisma and handsome appearance paired with popular background music (e.g., Video 1). The title of these videos are always rather random, e.g., one verse in the lyric of the background music; thus, they are not captured by the word frequency analysis.

[embed]Video 1 Title: Things have changed, people are gone, and before I can speak, tears flow (Wang Hongwen x Travel together again [the name of the background music])

Notes:

Replication scripts: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1jvbDnIUdwMtZbpDN9sgiCQs27n8fYXzW?usp=sharing

This is an assignment for course “Media Data Analysis | Digital Media Analytics [2025]” at the University of Hong Kong.

The historical facts outlined in this memo accord with those in MacFarquhar and Schoenhals’ 2006 book, Mao’s Last Revolution (Harvard University Press).

YouTube videos with the “Wang Hongwen” (in English) is very limited. The author only fetched 10 in total. For details, please refer to the “English keyword search” section in this Google Colab Notebook.

The corpora used in these two rounds of word frequency analysis were slightly different, but both contained approximately 500 videos.

This analysis only offers a possible surface-level explanation for why Wang Hongwen has sparked heated discussions among Chinese users on global social media. What might be more important is why the trigger of it, which is likely the heated discussion on Chinese social media, took place. Deeper reasons may include: online leftists seeking another symbolic figure besides Mao Zedong to distinguish themselves from online nationalists; and Chinese netizens’ nostalgia for and revival of the Cultural Revolution.

Coincidentally, Wang was born in December 1935. He came from a poor family, and his exact date of birth is unknown. Ninety years later, Chinese social media dedicated an entire month to discussing him.