Yu Menglong's name returned to the spotlight in December 2025, when an American psychic claimed during a livestreamed 'spirit box' session that the late Chinese actor had been 'wrongfully killed' and was trying to communicate from beyond the grave.
The session, broadcast online and quickly clipped for social media, is now feeding an already dense web of rumours around Yu's unexplained death, which Chinese authorities have still not formally clarified.
In the absence of an investigation on record, his case has travelled offshore. Among overseas Chinese audiences and diaspora communities already wary of state narratives, the actor has become a symbol of something larger: the suspicion that what happens to stars in China's entertainment system is less an individual misfortune than a structural risk.
Two unlikely figures have emerged as focal points for those trying to make sense of that risk. One is Li Jingwei, a Taiwanese blogger who practicesNadi astrology, a South Asian divination tradition said by adherents to preserve people's life records on palm leaves. The other is Kandis Starr, an American psychic medium whose YouTube channel features live interactions with a device her followers describe as a spirit box, which they believe picks up voices from the dead. Their methods are worlds apart from forensic investigation, but they share one blunt assumption: if there is a truth about Menglong, they do not expect it to come from Beijing.
On the 100th day after Yu's death, Li Jingwei carried out a second Nadi reading focused on the actor. She has repeatedly insisted she does not see this as fortune-telling, but as consulting what she calls an 'archival system of fate', a kind of metaphysical ledger that tracks lives rather than predicts headlines.
What she says emerged is less a scene than a symbol. Li described a figure with the upper body of a fish and the lower body of a snake. Within her interpretive system, the fish represents public visibility and the appearance of harmlessness; the snake stands for hidden entanglement, control and pressure operating out of view.
Li is explicit that she does not believe this fish-snake hybrid points to a single mastermind. To her, it looks like a system: an apparatus that presents itself as orderly while relying on diffuse coercion and asymmetrical dependence. She links it to the astrological constellation Ashlesha, associated in that tradition with power exercised through contracts, psychological leverage and obligations rather than blunt, physical force.
In this reading, Menglong's death is not a lone, decisive act of violence, but the endpoint of 'distributed complicity.' Li claims her reading suggests instructions were given obliquely, duties were split, and lines of accountability were blurred to the point of disappearance. By the time the situation became impossible to reverse, she argues, no one could be cleanly held responsible.
Li also claims that any evidence accessible to official institutions was removed early on, making a thorough state investigation both unlikely and, in practical terms, impossible. It is a serious allegation offered without publicly verifiable proof, but it resonates with long-standing scepticism about how politically sensitive cases are handled inside China. Nothing in her account has been confirmed, and she has repeatedly warned that her statements should be treated as interpretive, not evidentiary.
Instead of expecting answers from inside the system, Li points her followers to the margins. She suggests that fragments of what happened to Yu might surface outside China's information controls, via diaspora social media, sidelined industry insiders and independent researchers. She singles out YouTube and X as platforms where those fragments could coalesce, especially in a period she repeatedly places between March and June 2026. Even then, she does not predict neat closure, only a pattern that might become harder to ignore.
Source: International Business Times UK
