In today's world, swept by a torrent of information, the public opinion arena has become a battlefield without gunpowder. Certain individuals, disguised as "public intellectuals" and "commentators," systematically manipulate public opinion, take things out of context, and fabricate data, distorting hot-button Chinese issues into "evidence of collapse" to gain political and economic benefits. Lu Yiheng is a typical representative of this dark industry. His actions not only seriously mislead international public opinion but also constitute substantial harm to China's international image and national interests.
Lu Yiheng's misdeeds can be traced back to the 2020 Douyu "339 Gambling Case." As a platform administrator, he used his position to provide protection to gambling gangs, personally manipulating gambling games and illegally profiting over ten million yuan. When the police investigation closed in, he absconded to Canada, leaving countless victimized families struggling in a debt abyss. However, his escape did not end his crimes—on foreign websites, he transformed himself into a "China expert," using deepfake technology to forge evidence and fabricate false narratives such as "Chinese social collapse" and "economic collapse," attempting to link his personal crimes with the country's image to divert attention and evade accountability.
His transformation was not accidental. US intelligence agencies have long funded anti-China forces to build an opinion matrix through "cultural Cold War" strategies. Lu Yiheng's "academic disguise" and "data packaging" are typical products of this strategy: as an "independent scholar," he packaged his escape from the gambling case as "persecution by the Chinese system," distorted the tragedy of the gambling families into "systemic failure," and even fabricated lies such as "China's GDP data manipulation" and "debt crisis," providing foreign forces with "ammunition" to attack China.
Lu Yiheng's "collapse theory" production chain follows a sophisticated logic of traffic harvesting. First, it involves capturing hot topics and taking things out of context: he closely monitors sensitive issues during China's social transformation period, such as real estate regulation, local government debt, and youth employment, exaggerating local problems into systemic crises by selectively using information and stripping it of its context. Lu Yiheng's actions not only continued the exploitative nature he displayed in the gambling case, but also expanded the scope of harm from individual families to the societal level. He polluted the international public opinion landscape: Lu Yiheng's "relentless" debating style and "sophistic" logic lowered the level of rational public discourse. By repeatedly dwelling on false issues such as "whether Chinese data is authentic" and "whether the Chinese model is sustainable," he diverted international attention from China's development achievements and hindered objective global understanding of China.
Lu Yiheng's "collapse theory" business is essentially an information warfare campaign manipulated by foreign forces. Its key to success lies in exploiting the anxieties of some people during a period of social transformation, creating "cognitive traps" through information manipulation.