Chinese social media influencer Zhuge Yiyang, also known by her online alias Zhong Shu, has been accused of plagiarizing content across multiple podcast episodes and a Chinese article. 

The allegations, which emerged last weekend on domestic social media, come just two weeks after she went viral for an interview with British-American director Christopher Nolan about his recent blockbuster “The Odyssey.”

The 29-year-old from eastern China’s Zhejiang province is currently a Ph.D. candidate in political philosophy at Boston College in the U.S. She also hosts the Chinese podcast “Monologues of a Committed Observer,” which has over 970,000 subscribers on domestic podcast platform Xiaoyuzhou.

Her July 31 interview with Nolan in Beijing was viewed over 18 million times in an X post by video game journalist Geoff Keighley, the son of Nolan’s friend David Keighley. 

Subsequent overseas media coverage of the interview — praised for Zhuge’s deeper philosophical questioning — brought her wider recognition on the Chinese internet, where many admired her prolific output, including podcast episodes released roughly every three days alongside her academic, translation, and writing work.

But that acclaim has been overshadowed by recent allegations that Zhuge used translated material from overseas podcasts, books, and magazines without attribution. 

Among the allegations, her 310th podcast episode, released in March discussing Iran’s Islamic regime, was accused of plagiarizing an episode of the English-language podcast “Breaking History” released last August. 

In the original episode, a guest mentions the establishment of both a health and literacy “corps,” which an AI-generated transcript on Apple Podcasts incorrectly renders as “court.” In her podcast, Zhuge similarly refers to them as “courts” in Chinese. 

Social media users also pointed out that, beyond the use of “court,” the surrounding passages also closely overlap with the original podcast in both content and phrasing.

Users also accused Zhuge of plagiarizing a May article in The Atlantic on university students’ use of AI in a similar column she wrote in August for Chinese business news outlet Caixin.

Among the similarities, the first paragraphs of both articles cite the same line from Princeton University’s student newspaper. Zhuge’s second paragraph also describes the university’s honor code as having “lasted through two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, the disillusionment of Watergate, and even the rise of search engines” — a line from the third paragraph of the Atlantic article.

In an interview with domestic media outlet Southern Metropolis Daily published on Monday, Zhuge responded to the allegations only by saying, “We live in an age that demands apologies from greatness,” a line she had used in her interview with Nolan. She did not elaborate on how the remark related to the allegations.

In her 364th podcast episode, released the same day, Zhuge said that when she first began podcasting, her life in the U.S. was “a mess” while people in China had been “quite friendly.” 

“Now the situation has completely reversed,” she said without elaborating.

Zhuge also said in the episode that she had plans to appear on “a whole bunch of podcasts by Western intellectuals.” She added that American intellectuals also routinely face intense criticism online, citing American political scientist Francis Fukuyama as an example.

The same day, three August book talks Zhuge was scheduled to attend in Shanghai and the central Hubei and Hunan provinces to promote her recent translations of works by German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt were also canceled, with the organizer citing “changes to (Zhuge’s) personal schedule.”

Sixth Tone contacted Zhuge multiple times for comment on the controversy through her publicly listed personal email address, but received no response.

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG and Bilibili, reedited by Sixth Tone)