The Chinese Philosopher Americans Can’t Stop Fighting About

美国人争论不休的中国哲学家

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.

诸葛漪阳（Yiyang Zhuge）上周发现，当你突然爆红时，那些你关注多年的人会反过来关注你。诸葛登录 X（原推特）后发现，一连串著名的教授和学者出现在了她的新关注者名单中。作为波士顿学院政治哲学专业的博士候选人，诸葛此前在 X 上只是潜水，用来了解学术界的最新辩论和八卦。她绝大多数的社交媒体活动都在中文互联网上进行，在那里她以“钟叔”为笔名，主持着一档拥有数十万忠实听众的热门播客。

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?”

上个月底，二十多岁的诸葛采访了好莱坞最具影响力的导演之一克里斯托弗·诺兰（Christopher Nolan），当时他正在北京宣传《奥德赛》（The Odyssey）。诸葛没有问及明星或好莱坞，而是向诺兰提出了一系列深刻的哲学问题，探讨希腊哲学的基督教化以及如何在电影中塑造英雄。她问的第一个问题是：“你是一位黄昏文明的吟游诗人吗？”

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.

诺兰显然对诸葛印象深刻。采访在中国发布后，电子游戏记者、诺兰多年好友大卫·基利（David Keighley）之子杰夫·基利（Geoff Keighley）在 X 上分享了这段采访，称其“非常值得一听”。基利的视频播放量超过了 1800 万次，而当诸葛后来在自己的 X 账号上发布这段采访时，又获得了 690 万次的观看量。

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?

诸葛第一次成为了英语互联网的主角。她同时受到了赞美、嘲讽、批评和辩护。许多人称这是诺兰为《奥德赛》所做的最好的采访，而《国家评论》（National Review）则称其为“中共人质视频”。但每个人最终都想知道同一件事：这个留着波波头、谈论文明衰落的年轻中国女性到底是谁？

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.

虽然西方几乎没人知道她的名字，但诸葛已经是中国最杰出的年轻知识分子之一，并接受过许多国内文化精英的采访。她曾作为二十多岁成功女性的典范登上《Vogue》中国版，并经常在小红书上向她的 36 万粉丝分享瑜伽和健身技巧。

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.”

本周我与诸葛交谈时，她将自己的成功归结为源于个人悲剧。“我当时正在经历一场因出轨导致的离婚，前夫起诉了我，我背负了大量的法律债务，”她说。“由于与那场个人悲剧相关的某些经历，我在英语学术界感到灰心丧气，所以我将注意力转回中文世界，在那里建立事业并偿还债务。”

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.

当我开始深入研究诸葛的职业生涯时，她惊人的产出量让我感到震惊。除了发表哲学译作和为中国媒体撰写文章外，她在过去三年里录制了超过 360 期播客《一个观察者的独白》。这意味着平均每三天就有一期新节目。大多数时候，她只是即兴地就政治学概念进行半小时的独白。在中国最受欢迎的播客平台“小宇宙”上，她拥有超过 94 万订阅者。

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.”

尽管发帖量巨大，但诸葛声称她对出名并不感兴趣。“我对名声没有依恋，也没有为了名声而维护它的欲望，”她告诉我。“我想要的是足够的自由和时间来构建一种以思想为中心的生活。这种生活需要一些钱，但不需要太多。”

View From America / 美国视角

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.”

当诸葛问诺兰是否认为自己是“黄昏文明的吟游诗人”时，她说她并没有特指某个文明。相反，她将这个问题视为思考价值体系消亡这一悠久哲学传统的一部分。“我并不是主要试图对当代美国做出判决，”她说，但“人们可以自由地通过当前关于美国或西方衰落的辩论来解读这句话。”

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.

这确实是西方社交媒体上许多人的解读方式。在 X、YouTube 和 Reddit 上，评论者感叹西方采访者似乎无法向受访者提出同样严谨的问题。一些人纳闷为什么是一个中国女性来提出关于希腊的哲学问题，而另一些人则质疑西方机构是否还在向学生教授人文科学和经典著作。

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.

平心而论，诸葛是在西方体系中受教育的。她从高中起就在美国学习，曾在波士顿学院和布兰戴斯大学任教，并将汉娜·阿伦特（Hannah Arendt）和普鲁塔克（古希腊哲学家）的著作翻译成中文。她一年中大部分时间住在波士顿。她的学术工作借鉴了施特劳斯学派（Straussianism），这是一个影响了彼得·蒂尔（Peter Thiel）等人思想的保守派政治哲学流派。她在中国的名气——这使她获得了采访诺兰的机会——主要归功于她能简洁地解释美国政治制度，尽管一些批评者认为她自己的保守主义意识形态倾向经常出现在她的作品中。

“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.

“她受过美国保守主义的训练，所以她提出的问题确实引起了美国受过教育的公众的共鸣，”杜伦大学国际关系副教授张晨晨（Chenchen Zhang）说。张认为，当美国保守派熟悉的那些不安全感从一位中国女性口中说出时，观众会立刻相信“这就是中国看待西方文明的方式”。

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.

互联网对诸葛采访的反应让我想起了“Chinamaxxing”（中国化），这是 2026 年上半年在 Instagram 和 TikTok 等平台上流行的一个梗。这一趋势主要由倾向左翼的美国 Z 世代推动，他们试图通过刻意推崇中国和中国文化来麻痹自己对美国衰落的焦虑。