Intimate Relationship Case Study V: Mirror Within Mirror — Analyzing the Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang Relationship Through the Lacanian Lens
[!Epigraph] "The great advantage of men is that they are required, whether in childhood or adulthood, to embark on an arduous path; however, this is the most reliable path. The misfortune of women is that they are surrounded by almost irresistible temptations; they are not asked to strive upward, but are encouraged to slide down to bliss. When they realize they have been deceived by mirages, it is already too late, their strength exhausted in failed adventures." — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Abstract: This article seeks to transcend the "co-founder" commercial narrative, employing Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory to conduct a structural anatomy of the entrepreneurial duo Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang. This article will argue that their relationship is a highly representative specimen of the digital capitalism era: a symbolic machine constructed through dual mirroring, designed to capture and domesticate the desire of the "Other." Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang are not simple business partners, but complementary mirror projections of one another before the "Big Other" (capital markets, technological rationality, consumer society). Mao Wenchao represents the order and law of the Symbolic (capital logic, masculinized rational expansion), while Qu Fang plays the bond and embodiment of the Imaginary (community warmth, feminized emotional connection). The "Xiaohongshu" (RED) they co-created is essentially a colossal fantasy framework aimed at suturing the desire-lacuna of contemporary subjects—especially female subjects. However, this seemingly perfect complementary structure is perpetually disturbed by the Real—the endogenous contradictions of commercialization, the devouring of authenticity by traffic logic, and the dissolution of the founders' own subjectivity. Their relationship reveals how intimate collaboration is conscripted as the most efficient unit of productivity in platform capitalism, and how the subject, while attempting to become the master of desire, sinks deeper into becoming the echo of the "Big Other's" desire.
Introduction: From Entrepreneurial Myth to Desire-Production Apparatus
The story of Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang is often narrated as an entrepreneurial legend of a "top-scholar returnee" and a "foreign-enterprise white-collar worker" insightfully capturing the trend with perfect complementarity. This narrative serves the innovation myth and capital logic, shaping their union as a paradigm of rationality, acumen, and harmony. However, Lacanian theory requires us to pierce through this glossy surface, to investigate the unconscious dynamics driving this combination and the symbolic order it constructs.
From Lacan's perspective, the subject constructs its self through identification with the "mirror image" and the language/desire order of the "Big Other." Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang's entrepreneurial combination is itself a carefully constructed commercial mirror structure. Their personal characteristic differences (gender, background, style) are not accidental, but constitute a double-sided mirror capable of more completely reflecting and capturing the desires of target users (initially overseas-shopping women, later expanding to pan-lifestyle consumers). The "Xiaohongshu" (RED) they created is far more than an app—it is a symbolic apparatus attempting to systematically manage, guide, and realize (through consumption) the desires of modern people, especially women. Their relationship is a key case for understanding how platform economy instrumentalizes intimate relationship patterns and converts subject desire into calculable traffic.
Chapter One: The Mirror Stage and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Dyad
1. Differentiated Primordial Mirrors: Stanford Rationality vs. BFSU Sensibility The two individuals' backgrounds constitute perfect mirror complementarity. Mao Wenchao represents the typical "Symbolic" top-student trajectory: Shanghai Jiaotong University, Bain Consulting, private equity fund, Stanford MBA. His path points toward order, logic, and capital mastery. The Stanford experience not only equipped him with skills, but more crucially brought him into the symbolic system of the "entrepreneurial Big Other" represented by Bob Xu (徐小平), establishing the desire coordinates of "changing the world." Qu Fang, on the other hand, represents the fluidity and connection of the "Imaginary": Beijing Foreign Studies University, six years as a white-collar worker at Bertelsmann, a Fortune 500 foreign enterprise. She accumulated a sensory understanding of workplace culture, lifestyle taste, and interpersonal communication. As employees say, she "天生爱折腾" (loves stirring things up by nature), "好奇不安分" (curious and restless).
This difference is not opposition, but a Lacanian idealized complementary mirror. In the entrepreneurial "mirror stage," each saw in the other what they themselves lacked—traits that together could constitute a "more complete entrepreneur." Mao Wenchao provided the passport into capital and the rational order; Qu Fang provided the flesh-and-blood channel connecting to real users and the lifeworld. Their union was, from the outset, aimed at more effectively capturing and naming that elusive "she-economy" desire.
2. Shared "Lack" and the Condensation of the Object of Desire Their entrepreneurial origin jointly points to a kind of experiential lack. Mao Wenchao, at Stanford wanting to take his parents on a tour, found that travel guides lacked shopping information; Qu Fang, when traveling, always didn't know what souvenirs to buy. This feeling of "not knowing what to buy" is precisely the starting point of desire in the Lacanian sense. Desire is always desire for the desire of the Other. They universalized their own specific middle-class, globalization-era lack into the shared lack of Chinese consumers, and established the filling of this lack as the ultimate object of their enterprise.
This named object was initially "overseas shopping guides," later evolving into "mark my life." Xiaohongshu (RED), from the very beginning, was a gallery collecting, classifying, and displaying "object a" (those captivating commodities, those idealized lifestyles). Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang's relationship unfolds around the joint construction and maintenance of this gallery.
Chapter Two: Division of Labor and Performance as Agents of the "Big Other"
1. Mao Wenchao: Incarnation of the Symbolic Father and Signifier of Capital Mao Wenchao, in the partnership, gradually consolidated his role as executor of Symbolic law. He became CEO, the "face" oriented toward capital, strategy, and grand narrative. His resume itself is a perfect "signifier chain" readable by capital. Internally, he increasingly represented "platform rationality" and "ultimate decision." In 2024, the new community content head reported directly to him; he and Qu Fang jointly published an internal letter criticizing "big-company disease"—this was precisely exercising the legislative function of the "Name-of-the-Father": identifying the platform's symptoms and pledging to carry out order rectification.
He represents that unshakable rule core in the Xiaohongshu desire-machine: growth, valuation, business model closure. When he says "Xiaohongshu's greatest success is helping consumers achieve success," this statement itself is an elegant Symbolic construction: perfectly disguising and identifying the platform's capital-value-accumulation desire as the consumer's consumption-realization desire.
2. Qu Fang: Incarnation of the Imaginary Mother and Signifier of Community Qu Fang is deeply anchored in the Imaginary, becoming the signifier of the community's "soul" and "temperature." She is the "lifestyle spokesperson," frequently appearing before users, media, and the public, telling stories of "returning to life itself." She emphasizes "Xiaohongshu's content ecosystem is born for users"—this is precisely maintaining the collective imagination about sincerity, sharing, and beautiful life. She undertakes emotional labor, packaging cold algorithms and traffic into a warm "community."
This division of labor is a highly conscious symbolic performance. Qu Fang once made an analogy: "E-commerce is responsible for earning money to support the family (赚钱养家), content is responsible for being beautiful as a flower (貌美如花)." This sentence precisely reveals their Lacanian role allocation: Mao Wenchao is the "father" ensuring the "family" (company) continues in the Symbolic (earning money to support the family), while Qu Fang is the "mother" maintaining the inner emotional fantasy and charm of the "family" (being beautiful as a flower). She must continuously produce and maintain that originary fantasy of "authentic sharing," even as this fantasy faces erosion from commercialization at any moment.
3. Fusion: The Perfect Agent of the "Big Other" Their combined strength lies in jointly serving as perfect agents of the omnipresent "Big Other" (i.e., the desire order of contemporary consumer capitalism). This "Big Other" needs simultaneously to possess two faces: masculine, enterprising, rational (to earn capital trust), and feminine, refined, sensual (to earn user identification). Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang's bodies and genders naturally carry these two symbolic expectations.
They remarkably simultaneously received investments from both Tencent and Alibaba, precisely because their combination symbolized the perfect fusion of social and e-commerce, traffic and transaction, Imaginary and Symbolic, temporarily satisfying the "Big Other's" every fantasy about the next platform giant. Their relationship thus became a living corporate symbol, whose internal harmony itself became part of the company's value.
Chapter Three: The Punctum of the Real: Symptoms, Fractures, and Remainders
1. The Original Sin of Commercialization: Cracks in the Fantasy The core symptom of the Xiaohongshu model lies in its unresolvable endogenous contradiction: as a community of "authentic life sharing" (Imaginary fantasy) versus as an e-commerce/advertising platform that must "earn money to support the family" (Symbolic law)—this fundamental conflict. This is precisely what Lacan calls the eternal counterattack of the Real against symbolization efforts.
Qu Fang had to admit: "Xiaohongshu's rules are still not sufficiently refined, not sufficiently mature." "Fake notes" (虚假笔记) and "seed-planting overflow" (种草泛滥) became chronic ailments of the platform. These are not operational mistakes, but structural inevitabilities. When "authentic sharing" itself becomes the most marketable commodity, authenticity inevitably turns toward its own opposite—performative authenticity. The "trust" on which the platform survives is constantly corroded by its profit motives. Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang's relationship must continuously manage this trauma, sometimes emphasizing community purity (Qu Fang's role), sometimes advancing commercial monetization (Mao Wenchao's duty), maintaining a dangerous balance between the two.
2. Subject Dissolution Under Traffic Logic A more profound Real trauma lies in the fact that even as founders, their subjectivity is gradually devoured by the platform's traffic logic. Qu Fang's earliest happiest moments were seeing users grow from 1 to 10,000—that was a direct Imaginary connection between creator and creation. However, when users numbered in the hundreds of millions and the platform became a behemoth valued at tens of billions of dollars, their relationship with this "creation" became abstract and alienated.
They transformed from specific creators into administrators of a massive symbolic machine, even possibly reduced to some functional component of the machine itself. In 2024 they acknowledged the emergence of "big-company disease"—this precisely demonstrates that the once "battle-ready," integrated entrepreneurial subject had been replaced by a bloated, alienated organization. Their own "entrepreneurial partner" myth also became part of the company narrative requiring maintenance, possibly suppressing their more complex emotions and disagreements as individuals.
3. The Unsymbolizable Remainder: The Purity of Friendship? In all public narratives, Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang's relationship is strictly delimited within the categories of "挚友" (close friends), "老乡" (fellow townsfolk), "创业搭档" (entrepreneurial partners). This deliberate de-eroticized, de-personalized description is itself a symptom worth pondering. It highly purifies the relationship into a paradigm of instrumental-rational collaboration, excluding all ambiguous emotions that might interfere with business judgment.
However, from Lacan's perspective, any completely successful symbolization is impossible; there will always be some remainder that cannot be integrated. Their early passion of clicking immediately, their tight binding over a decade through crises and glory—does this contain any pure identification and jouissance beyond commercial calculation, akin to "object a"? This part is forever excluded from the public symbolic system, becoming the "silent core" of their relationship. It is precisely this unspeakable part that may be the initial spark that ignited this efficient dyadic machine, and also its ultimate "Real" remainder that cannot be completely reduced by any business model.
Conclusion: Cyborg Entrepreneurship and the Ultimate Outsourcing of Desire
Examined through the Lacanian lens, Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang's relationship marks the birth of a new type of "cyborg entrepreneurial subject": a combination of two people, through extreme symbolic division of labor and complementarity, forming an apparatus that in function far exceeds the simple sum of individuals, specifically designed for capturing and capitalizing on particular social desires.
They succeeded because they, ahead of most people, systematically responded to the Lacanian dilemma of the modern subject: we do not know what we truly want. What Xiaohongshu provides is precisely a colossal "mirror of desire" collaged from countless fragments of others' lives, where users stroll, temporarily constructing and confirming their own desire through identification with the desires of countless "little others" ( bloggers). Mao Wenchao constructed the hardware and algorithms of this mirror (Symbolic rules); Qu Fang applied warm halos to it and invited people to enter (Imaginary fantasy).
However, their story also reveals the limits. When the platform itself grows into a devouring-everything black hole, when "life" is thoroughly "marked" as sortable, analyzable, shoppable data streams, does the core of that entrepreneurial story that began because of "loving to stir things up" and "loving life" also face the danger of being hollowed out? Has their relationship, this precise dyadic mirror apparatus, while directing billions of users' desires into the Symbolic order of consumption, also become hostages of their own creation?
Ultimately, Xiaohongshu, this mirror-palace of desire, reflects not only contemporary people's shopping desires and display desires, but also Lacan's cold prophecy: the subject always desires through the Other, and the highest form of capitalism is to provide us with endless Other-mirrors and make us deeply believe that at the deepest depths of those mirrors lies our true self. Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang are both the architects of this mirror-palace and its first, most inescapable lifelong residents.
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