An Ice Cream Agenda
I
On September 12, a celebrity who made his name campaigning for consumer rights ate some ice cream at an airport. He didn’t like it and posted on Weibo.
There was a parenthetical in the post. Seven Chinese characters: Please, don’t mess with me.
An ordinary consumer who eats something awful and vents on Weibo doesn’t need to warn the company in advance not to hit back. He doesn’t even matter enough to warrant a response: he rants, the company keeps selling, and it probably never even sees his post.
Someone who opens with “don’t mess with me” knows exactly what power he holds.
II
He says this is a normal consumer review.
The whole maneuver hinges on that sentence. Let’s take it apart.
The law and common sense give the words “tastes awful” extraordinary immunity: no need to offer evidence, no need for verification, no need to take responsibility. Why? Because an ordinary person saying “tastes awful” can’t kill anyone. This is a protective exemption for the weak. That immunity costs little because the words carry no weight.
But when the same words come from someone who can put them on trending lists across the internet, the act itself is materially different.
The ice cream chain has more than 1,700 stores across 30 provinces, yet it didn’t dare respond with a single word on any platform. Trending headlines described its approach as “letting it blow over,” while people in the comments kept instructing the brand: do not reply, do not reply. The last company that ignored that advice answered a Weibo post from the same celebrity last September. Four months later, it closed 102 stores at once.
This isn’t expression. It’s allocation—allocation of the country’s finite supply of public attention for the week.
There is an old saying in communication studies: the media may not be able to tell you what to think, but they are exceptionally good at telling you what to think about. That power has a name: agenda-setting.
So “I’m just a consumer” translates as: I borrow the immunity of the weak to exercise the power of the strong.
III
Agenda-setting has three layers.
First, deciding what gets discussed. Making the country talk about ice cream this week.
Second, deciding how it gets discussed. What follows that same verdict of “tastes awful”? This: “I think it tastes far worse than Zhong Xue Gao. I miss Zhong Xue Gao.” So everyone talking about ice cream this week automatically has two reference points in mind: one tastes awful; the other is remembered fondly.
Third, deciding what doesn’t get discussed. Attention is zero-sum, and the trending lists have only so many slots. This week’s public attention went to a serving of ice cream. What got left out? No one knows, because those issues never made the list.
The true shape of agenda-setting power lies not in what it says, but in the issues it passed over—the ones no one talks about this week as a result. And the selection criterion is never importance; it’s shareability. A serving of ice cream makes the cut because it’s tangible, vivid, and everyone can imagine taking that bite.
IV
Now let’s lay out a timeline. I’ll present it without comment.
- May 7: Zhong Xue Gao’s 492 trademarks, eight patents, and eight copyrights were sold as a single lot on a judicial auction platform for 21.1 million yuan.
- June 4: The court confirmed that all the rights belonged to the buyer.
- This year: A company called “Changsha Zhong Xue Gao Foods” was incorporated. One of its shareholders is the parent company of a producer of quick-frozen foods that recorded 4 billion yuan in retail sales in a particular year.
- September 12: The celebrity called the other company’s ice cream awful and said, “I miss Zhong Xue Gao.” He added in parentheses: the latter had already gone bankrupt and been auctioned off, so spare me the idiotic conspiracy theories.
- The morning of September 14: Zhong Xue Gao’s bankruptcy administrator announced that the intangible assets had been separated out and the buyer was legally entitled to use them.
- Immediately afterward: The celebrity posted again: Zhong Xue Gao had, in fact, been wrongly blamed in the two biggest PR scandals it had faced back then.
- September 15: Zhong Xue Gao announced a new owner and a relaunch.
- September 16: It appeared at the Tianjin Ice Cream Expo.
One financial news outlet put it very cautiously: it was unclear whether this was a coincidence or something else.
I don’t know either. I’m even willing to believe it was a coincidence—someone misses a brand, and that brand happens to come back to life. These things happen.
But pay attention to that parenthetical. On September 12, before anyone had raised a question, he had already drafted a rebuttal to a conspiracy theory that did not yet exist: the latter had gone bankrupt and been auctioned off. That statement is literally true. Yet when he wrote it, the trademarks had been in new hands for three months, the new company had been registered, and the relaunch announcement was three days away.
Did he know? I don’t know. That is precisely the problem.
A consumer’s motives don’t need auditing, because no one cares why he says something tastes awful. An agenda-setter’s motives must be open to audit, because they determine what 1.4 billion people think about that week. When he demotes himself to a consumer, he also demotes his motives from a matter of public concern to a private affair.
That is the real payoff from this sleight of hand. It shields him not from responsibility, but from being questioned.
V
At this point, I have to turn the knife on myself, or this essay would be dishonest.
I set agendas too. Are cloud databases an idiot tax? Is cloud computing a pig-butchering scam? Are Big Tech companies just amateur outfits? I wrote those headlines, and I know what they do. I have some say in what 100,000 readers think about this week.
So I have no standing to say “influencers shouldn’t set the agenda.” This power cannot be abolished, nor should it be: where every front door has been welded shut, it’s the only lever that can still pry something open. Last year’s controversy forced the release of a draft national standard for premade meals. That is a fact.
There is only one difference between this celebrity and me, and I acknowledge that it is a difference of scale and attitude, not of kind:
I know I am setting an agenda, I admit I am setting an agenda, and I will not set an agenda while claiming to be just a user. Every article I write asks a question in the headline and makes its case in the body. Readers can take it apart on technical and factual grounds. If they hit the mark, I concede.
The very function of “I’m just a consumer” is to make that sort of challenge impossible—you can’t very well demand that a consumer produce evidence for his taste.
VI
So the question has never been whether he can say it tastes awful. Of course he can.
The issue is this: You can set the agenda. But you cannot set the agenda while claiming you’re only eating ice cream.
Agenda-setting is a form of power. Power can be unchecked, but it at least has to admit it is power.
This week’s ice cream agenda has already been set: one tastes awful, one is remembered fondly, and one appears at an expo today.
As for the things we should have discussed this week but didn’t—sorry, all the slots are taken.