From Dear You to Performing the Gesture of Catching a Spy

I increasingly feel that public controversies cannot be understood only from their surface. The surface layer is usually the loudest and the fastest to spread, but it is not necessarily the closest to the event itself. Very often, as soon as something enters the public sphere, it has already been reprocessed by media, platforms, emotion, and traffic. What people see is no longer the original event, but an event reshaped for circulation.

That is why I think most public hot topics should be viewed through at least three layers.

The first layer is the layer of public attention. This is the most visible and most easily discussed layer. Something like “Grandma’s love letter” may genuinely touch people because it carries the emotion, memory, and traces of an ordinary life. But once it enters the public sphere, it is quickly packaged as an emotional product. People may not really care about the life behind the letter. They are drawn instead to warmth, nostalgia, sentiment, or contrast. The circulation mechanism amplifies the part that produces the quickest reaction, while the more complex parts are flattened.

This layer is defined by speed. It does not require full understanding or careful judgment. It only needs to trigger a response. Sentiment can become a hot topic, anger can become a hot topic, absurdity can become a hot topic. A hot topic itself is not truth. It only means that something has received concentrated attention at a particular moment. Attention is not understanding, and noise is not recognition.

When we come to the phrase “performing the gesture of catching a spy”, the issue becomes even clearer. On the surface, it seems to refer to a concrete incident. In reality, it has already entered the layer of public performance. Whether there is an actual spy is no longer necessarily the centre of the discussion. What people are really discussing is whether this era can still accept a certain narrative, a certain posture, and a certain public gesture. In other words, the discussion appears to be about facts, but people are already asking whether this kind of fact can still be recognised by the present age.

This brings us to the second layer, which I would call the layer of consensual facts.

The layer of consensual facts does not mean that facts are unimportant. It means that once a fact enters the public sphere, it is no longer an isolated fact. The fact itself and the epistemology by which it is recognised cannot be completely separated. If you say that you have caught a spy, others may not immediately ask whether this person really is a spy. They may first ask why this language is still being used, why this narrative is still being invoked, and why this gesture has to be performed at this moment.

So even when all sides claim to be emphasising facts, they may not be emphasising the same object. Some emphasise concrete evidence. Some emphasise the atmosphere of the age. Some emphasise procedure. Some emphasise public psychology. Which fact is more factual is sometimes not the most important question. The more important question is which facts have already formed a stable consensus.

In a society, a fact that has not entered consensus may be ignored even if there is a great deal of evidence behind it. A claim that has already become consensual, even if incomplete, can become a very stubborn social fact. For example, if the public has broadly come to believe that this era should no longer manufacture enemies through an old style of political language, then even when a particular case contains real complexity, it may still be difficult for the public to accept it directly. What the public accepts is not an isolated fact, but an entire structure of historical and social consensus.

This is why the phrase “performing the gesture of catching a spy” is interesting. It is not merely mocking one particular action. It points to a mismatch between that action and the current public consensus. The gesture seems to be drawing on an older language and posture, but the public sphere no longer fully accepts that narrative. At that point, the factual question moves into the background. What people first see is posture, performance, and a sense of historical dislocation.

The third layer is the generative context of the event itself.

This is the hardest layer to see, and also the least suitable for rapid circulation. It is not simple enough, not sensational enough, and not easily compressed into a slogan. But to understand an event seriously, one often has to return to this layer. Why did someone write that love letter? What kind of life was that person living at the time? What did he or she want to express? Did the person even have the language to express it fully? These are not questions the attention layer can handle. The attention layer can only say that something is touching or ridiculous. The consensus layer can say that it represents a certain mood of the age. But the generative layer asks how the event actually came into being.

Likewise, the issue of “catching a spy” should not remain at the level of ridicule or anger. The deeper question is why this narrative can still appear, and what kinds of institutions, psychology, language, and procedural inertia continue to sustain it. It may not be simply evil, nor simply foolish. It may be the residue of an older public imagination that has not fully withdrawn. It can no longer naturally persuade the public, but it can still be used in certain situations.

Here we begin to see a deeper problem. The truth of a public event does not exist on only one layer. The first layer is truth as it is transformed into a circulating hot topic. The second layer is truth as it stabilises into public consensus. The third layer is truth as it is generated within the internal structure of the event. All three layers are part of reality, but they are not the same kind of reality.

“Grandma’s love letter” shows how private emotion can be reprocessed into consumable warmth once it enters the public sphere. “Performing the gesture of catching a spy” shows how an old public posture can become awkward once it loses its basis in shared consensus. One is the hot-topic transformation of tenderness. The other is the performative transformation of power. They seem unrelated, but behind them lies the same issue. Once something enters the public sphere, it is no longer merely itself.

This is also why many people involved in public events feel that something is wrong when they see the discussion online. What the public is discussing is no longer the thing they actually experienced. The media sees circulation. The public sees an emotional entry point. Platforms see feedback loops of traffic. Commentators see positions they can occupy. The event itself is pushed to the very end.

But we should not simply say that only the third layer is real. The consensus layer has its own reality too. A society does not act directly on the event itself. It acts on the basis of public consensus that has already formed. Many facts have power not because they exist in isolation, but because they have entered stable consensus. A fact without consensus is often unable to produce social consequences. A consensual fact, even if incomplete, can continue to shape judgment.

So when looking at public hot topics, the most important thing is not to rush into taking a position, but to separate the layers first. The first layer asks why this topic is being circulated. The second layer asks what consensus the public is forming around it. The third layer asks how the event actually came into being. Only by separating these layers can we avoid being dragged along by noise, mistaking public consensus for the event itself, or believing that reading a news item means we have understood an event.

From “Grandma’s love letter” to “performing the gesture of catching a spy”, what really matters is not the two specific hot topics themselves, but how they reveal the way the public sphere processes reality. It first turns events into hot topics, then turns hot topics into consensus, and only after that allows a small number of people to turn back and ask what actually happened. Most discussions stop at the first layer. Some reach the second. Very few are willing to pursue the third.

But if a person wants to understand the world in a stable and long-term way, he cannot live only on the first layer. Hot topics pass, emotions change, and traffic moves elsewhere. What remains is whether we have the ability to take an event out of the noise and see its form of circulation, its structure of consensus, and its generative context. Only then are we less likely to be pushed around by public emotion.