A certain rising star inadvertently revealed a ruby earring worth 2.3 million during filming, as determined by a jewelry blogger. What started as a routine operation in the fan community quickly escalated into a social issue when netizens uncovered that her father was a public servant involved in procurement in a certain city.
"The child is an independent adult, and the source of income is legal" was the old bureaucrat-style response, reminiscent of the classic line from the TV series 'In the Name of the People' by Zhao Dehan. However, the public clearly was not satisfied with this template answer—netizens began to piece together a timeline: the timing of the actress establishing her personal studio coincided exactly with significant infrastructure projects in her father's field of responsibility; a commercial event sponsored by a luxury brand appeared to overlap with investment projects her father had once discussed.
This generation of young people no longer believes in the scripts of 'rich second generation' or 'star second generation.' What they are more wary of is the new method of asset laundering by the 'public second generation'—transforming their parents' administrative resources into their children's top-tier halo through seemingly legitimate business operations. As an expert said at one forum: "When traffic can wash white the benefits of a political career, that is the highest level of asset securitization."
This uproar unveiled a collective cognitive trauma: in 2024, the median annual income of public servant families in a certain municipality was only 128,000, in stark contrast to the daily routine of celebrities wearing jewelry worth over a million. When the right to interpret 'legal income' spins in an information black box, the onlookers automatically imagine a political-business script akin to 'Crazy' (Kuang Biao). Just like that classic question on Zhihu: "Why can some public servants' children wear haute couture in Cambridge and walk the red carpet in Cannes?"
