As Xi Jinping gets closer to Ultimate Power
His Downfall become more likely
Can he survive?
Welcome to China Uncensored.
I’m Chris Chappell.
Shhhhh, it’s time for everyone’s favorite Communist Soap Opera, General Hostility:
Previously, on General Hostility…
China is in lockdown.
And the only thing more impossible to reach than zero Covid, is zero power struggle.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping must win the ultimate life-or-death fight against his enemies.
But just as victory is within his grasp, Xi suddenly faces an even deadlier foe:
A brain aneurysm!
That’s not bad writing, that’s an actual rumor that’s been spreading.
This is on top of, “rumors of a coup sparked by Covid lockdowns”.
Yes, as we near the end of this season of General Hostility , all the soap opera hits
are being played.
I can’t wait for the reveal of Xi’s evil twin.
Who turns out to actually be Xi’s archnemesis Jiang Zemin!
Who’s possessed by the devil!
Soap opera storylines are crazy.
I love it.
What I’m really hoping is, the last 70 years in China turned out to all just be a bad dream.
Anyway, sometime in the next six months, Xi will make a play for a third term as head
of the Chinese Communist Party.
But a rival political faction tied to former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin is trying to stop
it.
That faction has been using rumors, often conveniently spread by Western media, to smear
Xi Jinping.
The rumors really ramped up mid April, before an April 29 meeting of the Politburo, where
top Party leadership talked about enhancing internal stability.
Here are some of the big rumors that were circulating in Chinese speaking circles.
Rumor one is that members of the National People’s Congress, or NPC, wrote to Standing
Committee chairman Li Zhanshu asking that the “bandit Jinping” be removed.
Which if true, would have hurt his feelings.
“I am not a bandit!
I may be a dictator, a liar, a murderer, and a bandit.
But I am *not* a Juggalo!
Wait, what were we talking about?
The brain aneurysm is messing me up.”
Rumor two is that Xi will replace Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang and Shanghai Mayor
Gong Zheng, both of whom are his allies.
This is actually the most plausible rumor, because Shanghai officials did screw up the
Covid lockdown, and Xi Jinping could be pressured to remove his allies.
But that doesn’t mean he’s going to.
And perhaps the craziest of all, rumor three is that Xi has already announced he will relinquish
power and retire.
Those were just a few of many of the rumors going around.
Now some of these turned out to be blatantly false.
The Shanghai Party Secretary and Mayor have not been replaced.
And Xi relinquishing power?
Come on.
That’s not going to happen.
But the main point was to get people asking—is Xi losing his grip on power?
And that was a message “anonymous Chinese sources” began leaking to Western media.
More after this quick commercial break.
Welcome back.
Hopefully from an ad, possibly from a black void left by YouTube demonetization.
So, rivals to Chinese leader Xi Jinping are trying to spread rumors that he’s losing
his grip on power.
And that’s a message some Western media were all too happy to jump on.
Chinese officials have implemented a wave of Covid lockdowns so strict, they make Australia
lockdowns look like Florida lockdowns.
That’s because China has a Zero Covid policy.
And that policy comes from Xi Jinping himself.
Now inside China, there’s a wide range of opinions on that.
But the message being pushed in Western media is that it’s a threat to Xi’s grip on
power.
Here’s a recent article from Financial Times, Shanghai lockdown tests Xi Jinping’s loyalties
in China’s Communist party.
It says, “More and more voices are rising in Shanghai and inside the party, especially
coming from [vice-premier] Han Zheng, asking Xi to force [Shanghai Party Secretary] Li
to step down.”
Now that probably is true.
Like I said earlier, Shanghai’s Party Secretary Li Qiang is a Xi Jinping ally.
.
Meanwhile, Vice premier Han Zheng is part of the Jiang Zemin faction.
Han and Li are rivals for the position of premier, the second most powerful position
in China.
This is kind of like the TV show Succession, if the people writing Succession were on all
the drugs done by
the cast of Euphoria.
If Li Qiang were purged, Han Zheng is likely to nab the position of premier at the upcoming
Party Congress.
But speaking of current Premier Li Keqiang there have long been rumors of a split between
him and Xi.
We did a full episode on that back in 2020, check it out for background.
The Wall Street Journal is the latest one to fall for it.
And it is full of “anonymous” sources that sure are pushing a lot of familiar messages.
Like that “[Li Keqiang] is helping press China’s authoritarian leader to dial back
some measures that steered the country away from Western-style capitalism and contributed
to China’s economic slowdown, according to government officials.”
Yeah, remember when China totally practiced Western-style capitalism under Jiang?
Never trust anonymous sources.
Anonymous sources say
I look better without a beard.
Lies!
And Li Keqiang’s fight against Xi is supposedly “backed by some Communist Party officials
who worry Mr. Xi has focused too heavily on adhering to an ideology rooted in Mao Zedong’s
socialist vision, rather than on giving priority to practical measures to ensure economic growth”,
according to people close to decision making.
Yeah, Xi is totally like Mao Zedong.
Unlike Jiang Zemin who created his own personal gestapo and built up a massive security apparatus
that answered only to him and his cronies.
And finally, they claim “frustration with Mr. Xi’s autocratic style is boiling over,
according to people familiar with party discussions”.
Yeah, I wonder who these people are.
So the message here is that Li Keqiang and others are fighting back against Xi’s delusions
of grandeur and his attempts to become another Mao Zedong.
However, according to SinoInsider a China political risk consultancy, “Remove the
framing, and nothing in the Journal report indicates anything out of the ordinary.”
Basically, Li Keqiang as the premier, the guy in charge of China’s economy, has been
making economic policy decisions.
Those decisions are a shift from earlier economic policy.
But these changes must be backed by Xi, otherwise they wouldn’t have seen the light of day.
“Put another way, the Journal article actually confirms that Li has been doing his job and
in turn that Xi is pragmatic enough to shift policy when needed.”
Essentially, these anonymous Chinese sources are playing the biases of Western media.
You see there’s a problem in the West.
A lot of people think Xi Jinping is the bad guy.
And don’t get me wrong, this guy is not exactly Mr. Sunshine.
I’ve made a living pointing that out.
But the bigger problem is the Chinese Communist Party itself.
It has always been committing genocide and ethnic cleansing,
and waging war on the West.
That’s been going on way before Xi Jinping came to power.
Thinking that Xi Jinping is the real problem is like going to see a ventriloquist and getting
mad at the dummy.
But, before Xi Jinping, it was easier for some Western businessmen and politicians to
make a lot of money in China.
And they’re under the delusion that if we just got rid of Xi Jinping, things would go
back to the good old days—where they could make money more easily.
That was the main idea of the Longer Telegram.
It was an anonymous report by the Atlantic Council, a prestigious think tank.
And it was “written by a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience
dealing with China.”
Hmmm...More anonymous sources.
It’s called the Longer Telegram because this anonymous author wants to compare his
report to the “Long Telegram,” an actual telegram sent by George Kennan, an American
diplomat in Moscow to the State Department in 1946.
The Long Telegram basically predicted what the Soviet Union would do during the Cold
War and laid out what became US policy for dealing with it.
So clearly, the author of the Longer Telegram is hoping for a similar place in history.
I’m not saying everything in the Longer Telegram is wrong.
But the author clearly says that opposing the Chinese Communist Party as a whole is
a mistake.
And that the goal of the US should be to get back to a pre-Xi Jinping Communist Party.
You know, the good old days.
So clearly there are Western elites who think that Xi Jinping is a problem, but the Chinese
Communist Party is just fine and dandy.
Which is where all of these recent wild rumors about Xi come in.
According to SinoInsider, “By leaking political rumors that are blatantly anti-Xi to the overseas
press, the ‘people familiar with decision-making’ could also be looking to signal to the foreign
‘anti-Xi, not anti-CCP’ crowd that there is currently very strong opposition to Xi
in the Party, and that the time to mobilize and coordinate moves against the Xi leadership
is at hand.”
Essentially, they’re trying to artificially build up hype.
Kind of like Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican Pizza.
No one’s actually excited it’s coming back… they’re just tricking you into thinking
you are.
Which brings me to this recent piece, Xi Jinping Scrambles as China’s Economy Stumbles.
It was written by former Australian prime minister and Asia Society president Kevin
Rudd.
Rudd speaks Mandarin, and he also totally messed up Australia’s China policy by being
a big fat appeaser to the Chinese regime.
A lot of people think Kevin Rudd was the guy who wrote the Longer Telegram.
And guess what?
Rudd’s message in this Wall Street Journal piece is that all of the problems facing China
right now have nothing to do with a decades old corrupt Communist system.
No, no.
It’s all Xi Jinping’s fault.
“The economic problem rests with Mr. Xi and his pivot to the state.
He…has moved Chinese economic policy well to the ideological left.
Mr. Xi has begun strangling the goose that, for 35 years, has laid the golden egg.”
It also criticizes Xi’s Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Rudd is living in a fantasy land about what China was like before Xi.
But that perfectly summarizes the views of these anti-Xi, not anti-CCP China experts.
They’re fighting the symptom, not the cause.
Essentially, they’re trying to cure cancer with cough syrup.
So, is Xi Jinping really in danger?
Is his third term at risk?
Likely, all this will just, “convince Xi Jinping to move more quickly and more fiercely
against his factional rivals to secure a third term.
On the current trajectory, high-level purges or other political Black Swans can be expected
to happen before [a major CCP] meeting in the fall.”
So the season finale of General Hostility will be pretty exciting.
And YouTube is still playing dirty with us, so the biggest part of our budget to continue
making the show and paying our staff comes from the China Uncensored 50 Cent Army, fans
who contribute as little as a dollar per episode on the crowd funding website Patreon
Or our exclusive social media platform on Locals.
As a thank you, I’ll answer your questions at the end of an episode.
Todays’ question comes from Ethan Baker on Patreon.
Hey Chris and crew.
I am just wondering if you see China’s current lockdowns and long term aim of the zero Covid
strategy as less of a Covid protection measure, or more of a long term biological weapons
defense system?
Since biological weapons have been around for decades but countries couldn’t use them
because of fear of harming your own country.
Ethan!
Are you trying to get us in YouTube jail?!
You can’t mention Covid and biological weapons in the same sentence on YouTube!
I mean, you can’t mention Covid.
Period.
And biological weapons.
Period.
In the same sentence on YouTube.
Period.
I think I fooled the algorithm.
But yes, anyway, the idea is, does the Communist Party have some secret reason for pushing
the Zero Covid policy, like it’s actually testing strategies for population control
in the event of a biological weapon?
To that I got to say, if their plan to stop Covid is putting up metal fences, China is
screwed.
Whatever Zero Covid is all about, it’s clear it’s not about effectively controlling a
virus.
Keep up the good work!
Really, I think what’s behind the Zero Covid policy is just the Communist Party’s inability
to ever admit it was wrong.
They spent years talking about how great their response to Covid was, how horrible the United
States response was.
But now, the US is mostly past Covid.
And it’s looking like Covid is only really a problem in China.
So the Party doubles down.
Zero Covid totally works.
The problem in Shanghai is they just didn’t lockdown fast and hard enough.
And people keep trying to escape!
It’s never the Communist Party’s fault.
Thanks for your question and your support, Ethan.
And if you want to join the China Uncensored 50 Cent Army and help us fight against Communism,
all it takes is as little as a dollar per episode over on the crowd funding website
Patreon.
That’s patreon.com/chinauncensored.
Once again I’m Chris Chappell, see you next time.