In the past few days, internal disputes at two companies have drawn outsized public attention. One involves East Buy, where a conflict over the ownership of livestream host Dong Yuhui’s copywriting sparked a major clash between his fan base and the company, bringing his tensions with management into the open. The other involves Gree, whose chairwoman and president Dong Mingzhu again mentioned Meng Yutong at the company’s 2023 university graduate onboarding ceremony and sharply criticized her.
Online, these stories have generated no shortage of debate. But at their core, they are still company matters, and in the end companies have to deal with them themselves. What is striking is the pattern: a company ends up publicly at odds with one particular employee, or even with someone who did not stay long before leaving. That is a phenomenon worth paying attention to.
A company and its employees are, in principle, supposed to lift each other up. Whether it was East Buy and Dong Yuhui, or Gree and Meng Yutong, both sides clearly benefited from the relationship at one stage. The company gave them a platform; they, in turn, brought attention and visibility back to the company. On paper, it should have been an ideal story of mutual success.
That narrative broke down quickly. Both Dong and Meng acquired influence and a public voice far beyond what their formal job titles would normally imply. They were no longer just employees. They had become celebrity livestreamers, internet personalities with large followings of their own. Once a company still tries to manage such people as if they were ordinary staff members, friction becomes almost inevitable.
The deeper reason is that people like Dong and Meng have been remade by modern communication technology. New media did not simply make them more famous; it altered their identity and allowed them to move beyond the traditional limits of being "an employee." Outside the workplace, a much wider world now offers many more possibilities. In that setting, they become what companies struggle to accommodate: destabilizing figures who no longer fit neatly inside the organization.
This does not necessarily mean the companies are wrong. A company has collective goals to pursue, and its relationship with star employees is inherently delicate. One management book, written in the form of a novel, identifies a fatal obstacle for organizations as "inattention to results"—the point at which personal goals and corporate goals can no longer be aligned, and people are no longer working toward the same outcome. From a company’s perspective, when dealing with high-profile employees like Dong and Meng, there is almost always an impulse to bring things back under control.
From the individual’s point of view, though, whatever one thinks of influencers, livestreaming, or social media, these forms now provide value outside the workplace. They give people the possibility of existing beyond a formal system. In a sense, they announce a new way of being: a person can stand as a person, no longer fully dependent on a social role for recognition or worth. Once someone is favored by new media, their public self can be rebuilt.
That is why this also recalls the kindergarten teacher who went viral because of the song often referred to as “Dig Ya Dig,” and later chose to sell products through livestreaming. Many people reacted harshly, accusing her of forgetting where she came from. But from an observer’s perspective, it may not be a matter of her subjectively abandoning her roots. Objectively, she no longer needed an organizational identity in order to exist in public. She only needed to be herself. Before the internet era, that kind of opportunity would scarcely have existed.
For companies, there may be little point in agonizing too much over this kind of conflict. It reflects a larger force beyond any one firm’s control—a byproduct of technological progress and industrial change. The old corporate structure’s power over individual destinies has already been weakened. That is also why Dong Mingzhu’s criticism of Meng Yutong did not seem to land particularly well online. Traditional success narratives—the old path of climbing the hierarchy, becoming a CEO, and reaching the pinnacle of life—no longer carry unquestioned authority. Naturally, they are less persuasive than they once were.
And for ordinary onlookers, these incidents may seem remote, but they are not necessarily so distant. When a social form changes and a new kind of media penetrates daily life, its effects rarely stop with a few celebrity cases. Over time, it can reshape how people think and behave. In the past, people mainly wanted to perform better inside a company. In the future, more people may want something else: to be themselves. If being oneself can also provide a way to live, that is not such a bad thing.