Making the Yu Menglong Case and Global Digital Petitions Intelligible—De-religionizing the "Child of Light" Symbol

Abstract This paper is a conceptual and analytical study that examines how public issues can remain intelligible and sustained in the global public sphere through processes of translation, even in the absence of institutional consensus or authoritative adjudication. Taking the Yu Menglong case (于朦朧事件) and its associated transnational digital petitions as an analytical focus, the study explores how an event initially framed within the entertainment industry was translated into a publicly intelligible issue articulated through the language of universal human rights and public trust. Rather than adjudicating the factual validity of the event, this paper analyzes how digital petitions operate as discursive practices that reorganize public visibility and intelligibility. Through conceptual translation and narrative reconstruction, such actions avoid being reduced to emotional mobilization or religiously framed appeals, and instead sustain the possibility of public response under conditions of uncertainty. From a theoretical perspective, the paper introduces public intelligibility as a key analytical concept for understanding digital activism beyond metrics of mobilization or institutional outcomes. It shifts attention toward how collective actions can be recognized as reasonable and worthy of response even when social consensus has not yet been established. From a public perspective, the study argues that the persistence of a public issue does not arise from oppositional negation or the competition of definitive conclusions, but from its continued intelligibility and responsiveness within public discourse. Translation, in this sense, functions as a condition that allows contested issues to remain publicly present rather than prematurely closed or silenced. Overall, this paper contends that the core value of digital petitions lies not only in scale or immediate results, but in their capacity to generate public intelligibility, enabling issues that should not be ignored to persist, circulate, and remain open to interpretation and response within the global public sphere. Keywords: digital petitions, public intelligibility, universal values, celebrity politics, Yu Menglong, global public sphere, “Child of Light” , Avaaz, translation