A few notes on why and how the immense popularity of Le Bon’s Psychologies des Foules in China became the emblem of Chinese intellectuals’ ineptitude and self-fulfilling prophecy of distrusting the crowd:

Le Bon was first translated in the 20s but then largely abandoned as ‘reactionary’ bourgeois thinking since 1949. It was reintroduced in the 1970s and became hugely popular in its current title 乌合之众.

(sidenote) 乌合 means ‘to gather in a hasty and disorderly manner, like a murder of crows’. The nomenclature is already revealing.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%8C%E5%90%88

The spectre of Le Bon coincided with a generation of resurfacing intellectuals who was suspended by the cultural revolution and again traumatised by the late 80s. The book came to public view as some sort of panacea to all the traumas afflicted by the crowd and its events.

The distrust of the crowd then developed into a phobia at a societal level, especially for the so-called elites (way more extensive than simply the State itself). Whenever the crowd panicks, viral emotions of paranoia circulates, Le Bon resurfaces as the collective self help book

Le Bon’s second life as a best seller author is also weird since they are certainly better authors who articulate better theories of the crowd…It’s not an issue of archaic and outdated quasi-academic book but a intellectual climate that is still stuck with it.