Xi Jinping, his Emulation of the Great Leap Forward, and the Rise of the Communist Party in China: His Political Legacy, His Fate, and His Implications

China is facing its largest flare-up of Covid cases in a month, complicating its preparations for an all-important Communist Party meeting where Xi Jinping is expected to expand his authority and claim another term in power. They are going to prevent the spread of the coronaviruses from coming to Beijing, the capital where the meeting will be held.

Mao is widely regarded today in the West as, at best, a flawed patriot and, at worst, a brutal dictator. The Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962, his misguided attempt at rapid industrialization, contributed to a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese. So intent were ordinary Chinese on raising steel production that they melted down hoes, plows and other iron implements in crude backyard furnaces, leaving them nothing to work the fields.

No one outside of historians would care ifplay acting were the extent of Xi’s emulation of Mao. It’s more than that. Mao claims the primacy of the Communist Party. He is squeezing out foreign-owned businesses. He relies heavily on propaganda and cuts off his people’s access to foreign sources of information. He harbors bitterness toward nations — such as Japan, Britain and the United States — that he believes humiliated China in the past and aim to prevent its rise to greatness today. And he is intent on completing Mao’s civil war with the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek by absorbing Taiwan, where the Nationalists fled in defeat in 1949.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a cautionary tale, and has been cited many times by the Chinese Communist Party.

But instead of following in the reformist footsteps of his father, Xi opted for a path of total control. He has eliminated his rivals, strengthened his grip on the economy, and made the party pervasive in China, all because of the old authoritarian and new surveillance technology he has used.

The purge of Hu at a critical time like the 20th Party Congress shows the presence of dissent, along with the idea that Xi is at least challenged. “Neither is great for Xi’s image of invincibility.”

The nationalist mission appeals to Chinese citizens more than Marxism-Leninism does. The displays of patriotism during the Beijing Winter Olympics were sincere, as was feelings of hurt when the US blamed China for the Pandemic. Even Chinese who may be averse to Communist Party rule still love their country.

Mr. Xi was able to build on the progress made by his forbears. But he has been skillful, too. The internet could have made an authoritarian rule more powerful, but that is not what the government has done. China is the world’s most advanced techno- autocracy and has a technology backwater for much of 20th century.

Fighting back tears, she shouts abuse at the hazmat-suited workers below in a video that has recently gone viral on social media platform Weibo and which appears to encapsulate the Chinese public’s growing frustration with their government’s uncompromising zero-Covid policy.

The woman has been under quarantine for half a year since returning from university in the summer, she shouts at the workers. They stare back, seemingly unmoved.

Can the Xi Jinping test be fought against the Covid? No to the Sitong Bridge, the site of the infamous protest, nor to the amoral censorship

“The issue is Xi Jinping already associated himself with the ‘successful’ model of fighting Covid, so the zero-Covid policy now is a de facto Xi Jinping policy,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, adding that China’s handling of the virus in comparison to other countries remains a point of national pride for many Chinese.

The claim comes as a new strain of flu is spreading just days before the congress of the Communist Party which is expected to cement the position of the nation’s leader in decades.

Observers across the world will be watching the twice-a-decade meeting for signs of the party’s priorities when it comes to its zero-Covid stance, which has been blamed for exacerbating mounting problems in the economy, from stalled growth to a collapsing housing market.

Do not take the Covid test, and yes to food. Yes, to freedom, no to being locked up. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. One banner said that they should be a citizen and the other another called for the ousting of a traitor.

TheSitong Bridge, the site of the protest, was immediately excluded from search results on Weibo. Key words that were restricted from search included Beijing,Haidian,warrior,brave man, and evencourage.

Accounts on Weibo and WeChat have been banned after being used in a way that was related to the protest.

There were many who spoke out to express their support and awe. Some sharing the Chinese pop hit ‘Lonely Warrior’ in reference to the protester, who some called a “hero,” while others said they would never forget, posted under the #.

Beijing hasn’t given up on Covid: The city on the edge of the latest epidemic, with an update from Inner Mongolia and Far West Xinjiang

With the state media reporting this week that the country may change tack post- Congress, the signs suggest that the zero- Covid approach will stick, possibly into 2023.

In the city where 25 million people have been locked up since February, residents are on edge at any signs of a repeat.

The city reported 47 Covid-19 cases on Thursday, one day after authorities ordered six out of its 13 districts to shut entertainment venues such as internet cafes, cinemas and bars. Disney Resort in China has stopped live and live attractions for a period of time.

Spooked by the possibility of unpredictable and unannounced snap lockdowns – and mindful that authorities have previously backtracked after suggesting that no such measures were coming – some people in the city have reportedly been hoarding drinking water.

That panic buying has been made worse by an announcement that Shanghai’s water authorities have taken action to ensure water quality after discovering saltwater inflows to two reservoirs at the mouth of the Yangtze River in September.

Authorities are scrambling to contain the spread of the BF.7 coronaviruses strain after it was found in China in late September, though they are not sure what is driving the increase in infections.

The country has also seen an uptick in cases in domestic tourist destinations, despite its strict curbs having discouraged people from traveling or spending over China’s Golden Week holiday in early October.

More than 240,000 university students have been locked down on campus in Inner Mongolia due to the latest outbreak, according to a deputy director of the department. The university Communist Party boss was sacked after 39 students from his institution tested positive, following the outbreak on campus.

Then there is the situation in far western Xinjiang, where some 22 million people have been banned from leaving the region and are required to stay home. Xinjiang recorded 403 new cases on Thursday, according to an official tally.

Yet amid it all, Beijing appears unwilling to move from its hardline stance. For three days this week, the state-run Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily published commentaries reiterating that China would not let its guard down.

The battle against Covid was winnable, it insisted. It said the countries that had reopened and loosened restrictions were able to do so because they failed to effectively control the epidemic.

The Party Sits on the Top of the World: The Economic and Social Progress of the Chinese President Xinpeii in the First Five Years

China seems to be an unstoppable rising power. The country was basking in the afterglow of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and had recently overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy.

Mr. Xi fell into the same trap that has ensnared dictators throughout history: He overreached. He has concentrated more power in his hands than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, looming so completely over the country that he’s been called the “chairman of everything.”

The Chinese dream is to restore their past glory and regain their rightful place in the world.

China sits on top of the world and the party sits on top of China, with PresidentXinpeii sitting on top. That’s basically the program,” said Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia.

The Chinese Communist Party congress is expected to give the position of general secretary to Mr. Xi, who has been in that role for five years. The third term of his leadership could spell years of uncertainty as problems mount around him who has shown little inclination to share decision-making.

Bo was trying to get promoted to the top leadership when his police chief tried to defect to the United States, accusing Bo of trying to cover up his wife’s murder. Party leaders feuded over how to deal with the fallout. Eventually, Bo was investigated and expelled from the party weeks before the five-yearly power reshuffle. Bo and his wife are today both serving life in prison.

“Our party faces many grave challenges and there are many pressing problems within the party that need to be solved, in particular corruption,” Xi said in his first speech hours after being appointed the top leader.

Xi also ramped up the party’s control of the economy, especially its once-vibrant private sector. His sweeping regulatory crackdown brought tycoons to heel and wiped out trillions of dollars of market value from Chinese firms.

In the online sphere, extensive censorship and real-life retaliation tamed social media. Rather than serving as a catalyst for social and political reforms, it was an amplifier for party propaganda and a breeding ground for nationalism.

As China’s Communist Party National Congress meets this week to approve the party’s priorities for the next five years, many are watching for signs restrictions could be loosened. But with Xi having personally tied himself to the policy, any change would need to come straight from the top – and from a leader, who throughout his rule, has sought to extend, not curtail, the party’s control on daily life.

Hundreds of thousands died in the chaos, including Xi’s half- sister who was killed. The father of Xi was tortured. Xi himself was incarcerated, publicly humiliated and sent to hard labor in an impoverished village at age 15.

According to an American expert on Chinese politics, his emphasis on party authority and stopping people from talking about it is due to his fear of chaos which he saw happen to himself and his family.

“(He) believed that to achieve political order you needed to have a powerful leader, a powerful party, not creating a system in which people had rights that went too far, because they would only abuse them and hurt other individuals,” Torigian said.

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken,” Xi told senior officials in a speech months after taking the helm of the party.

The Gate of Heavenly Peace: China’s Day in the Life and Times of a Cold War, and the Prospect for Reunification with Taiwan

The US has woken up to the competition with China and is teaming up with other nations to take a number of measures against Beijing on trade and technology.

The foreign policy of the president was aggressive abroad. “Xi thinks this is China’s moment. It is necessary for him to be assertive and take risks to seize that moment.

When he presided over a grand celebration to mark the party’s 100th anniversary, he gave a stark warning to the West. The Gate ofHeavenly Peace, the entrance to the palace of imperial China, was the place where the president said the Chinese nation will be free from oppression and tyranny by foreign powers. “Anyone who dares to try, will find their heads bashed bloody against a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” he said to thundering applause from the crowd.

Since coming to power, Xi has repeatedly warned against the “infiltration” of Western values such as democracy, press freedom and judicial independence. He has restricted foreign NGOs, churches, Western movies and textbooks due to their role asvehicles for foreign influence.

The two Russian men share a deep suspicion and hostility toward the US, which they believe is intending to hold China and Russia back. They both have a vision for a world order that better accommodates their nations and is no longer dominated by the West.

In China it is difficult to gauge public opinion. Independent polling on politics is banned, and speaking out against the Communist Party can get you thrown in jail. But many people do say they genuinely like Xi and think he is doing a fine job leading the country.

Underpinned by rising nationalism, China has started flexing military muscle beyond its shores. Reunification with Taiwan, long claimed by the Communist leadership despite having never ruled it, would be viewed as the crown jewel of the future of the country, as tensions over Taiwan pose a real threat of war in Asia.

That difficult international environment, along with the toll of zero-Covid and the economic headwinds, poses a big challenge for Xi in the years ahead.

Walled inchina Xi Jinping: A global challenge facing the Omicron outbreak during the 2018 National Day holiday in China

During China’s National Day holiday in early October, several expatriate friends and I took our young children – who are of mixed races and tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd – to the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing.

Some local families walked past us as we climbed the restored and almost deserted section of the ancient landmark. One of their children exclaimed: “WOW foreigners!” With Covid? Let’s leave them… The adults remained quiet as the group quickened their paces.

The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction that normally draws throngs of visitors during holidays, was almost empty when we went because of the zero tolerance policy on Covid infections that was instituted three years into the global Pandemic.

China’s borders have remained shut for most international travelers since March 2020, while many foreigners who once called the country home have chosen to leave.

With the highly contagious Omicron variant raging through parts of the country, authorities had discouraged domestic travel ahead of National Day holiday. They are also sticking to a playbook of strict quarantine, incessant mass testing and invasive contact tracing – often locking down entire cities of millions over a handful of cases.

Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/17/china/walled-in-china-xi-jinping-global-challenges-intl-mic/index.html

“Blame the foreigners” vs. “the young people” in China: a socialist market economic perspective on China’s future

The local child said that while on the Great Wall. But the true danger of the “blame the foreigners” sentiment comes when adults in powerful positions take advantage of it in the face of mounting pressure on the domestic front.

A history paper recently released by a government-run research institute has gone viral and upended a long-held consensus. Instead of denouncing the isolationist policy adopted by China’s last two imperial dynasties as a cause of their backward turn and eventual collapse, the authors defended its necessity to protect national sovereignty and security when faced with Western invaders.

Xi Jinping defended his hard-line reign on Sunday, presenting himself to a congress of China’s ruling elite as the leader whose tough policies had saved the nation from the ravages of the pandemic and was now focused on securing China’s rise amid multiplying global threats.

But his praise was coupled with a somber warning that the nation must stand united behind the party to cope with a world he depicted as increasingly turbulent — and hostile. He didn’t mention the U.S., but his distrust of the world’s other great power was a constant backdrop to that exhortation.

“Be mindful of dangers in the midst of peace,” Mr. Xi said. Prepare to go through major tests of high winds and waves and even perilous, cloudy seas if you get the house in good repair before rain comes.

Mr. Xi, who is expected to secure a groundbreaking third term when the Communist Party congress concludes this week, made just three references to market reforms in his nearly two-hour speech and omitted more than a dozen others from a longer, written version. He pledged to create a bigger role for socialism and the public sector by focusing on issues of national security and corruption, as well as extolling state projects in spaceflight and super computers.

When he did talk about markets, the message was established rhetoric. He lauded “socialist market economic reform,” while also arguing that China’s economy should “give full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation.”

A professor at the party’s top academy was one of the people that they included. An economist would be the winner of the economics prize in China. A young historian is planning to teach a class about contemporary Chinese history.

Ten Years in Beijing: China’s Second-largest economy and a beloved scholar’s daughter, Jewher Ilham Tohti

In other news from China, the government said it was delaying indefinitely the release of economic data that had been expected to show continued lackluster performance.

Ten years ago, when he was taking the helm of the most populous nation and world’s second-largest economy, China’s president smiled graciously.

A person paying attention is a scholar named Ilham Tohti. Initially, he was happy to see him in the top spot of the party.

“He sounded so excited. He’s like, ‘I think it’s going to change now. Things are going to get better,’” says the scholar’s daughter, Jewher Ilham, who lives in the United States.

Uyghur ethnic group, which calls Xinjiang home, is where Ilham Tohti is from. He made a name for himself as an outspoken activist for Uyghur rights and the Uyghur language and culture.

A million or more people will eventually be brought to justice. The U.S. has called it genocide. The UN’s top human rights official said in a recent report that crimes against humanity may have arisen from abuses in Uyghur. China denies any wrongdoing.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1127852397/china-xi-jinping-10-years-perspectives

Yoga in the Cultural Revolution: Ten Years of Living in the Coiled Rope: A Conversation with Vis and his Tibetan Husband, Wang Yi-Mills

But it comes with a cost. The impact on the economy has been huge, with heightened uncertainty smothering consumer confidence and rendering business planning all but impossible.

Vis and his neighbors drafted a statement of protest. They played it in public for all to hear after he recorded it.

In the spring, the lock down began. Since it was lifted in June, Vis has pieced his yoga business back together for the most part. He says it left a scar on everyone.

“If it happened once, it could happen a second time,” Vis says. In China there’s a saying that if you’re bitten by a snake, you will be afraid of coiled rope for a decade.

During the Cultural Revolution in the 70s,Zhang was sent to the northwestern Chinese countryside to work near where he worked as a youth in that turbulent era. Zhang says he’s known about Xi since then — and liked his style.

According to Zhang, the child of revolutionaries is capable of taking action that his predecessors were not able to because he understands the plight of the country’s poor. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a guerrilla fighter in the civil war and later a vice premier.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1127852397/china-xi-jinping-10-years-perspectives

Beijing hasn’t given up on its country’s security, but does it threaten to wipe out the climate fight in the coming era of rapid global warming and climate change

There is a situation in Hong Kong. The people of the former British colony had a pro-democracy movement, and they enjoyed freedom of speech.

street protests erupted in the city in what is now known as the “Umbrella Movement”, calling for the right to directlyelect the city’s leaders.

Five years later, a proposed extradition law sparked fresh demonstrations. She flew home so that she could get her master’s degree.

Beijing took the step of imposing a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong in 2020. The arrests that followed decimated Hong Kong’s democracy movement.

Someone has not blinked. He said that the one country, two systems model for running Hong Kong is a great innovation, and that China has succeeded in overcoming grave challenges to its national security.

In 1997 the territory was promised a high degree of autonomy under the agreement that led to its return to China. Critics say China has reneged on that promise.

“Basically, my life has, like, gone to pieces because of Xi Jinping,” she said. I lost my home. I lost many of my friends. And I’ll never set foot in Hong Kong again.”

Four people with very different experiences were included in this group. It is impossible to capture the mood in a country with over one billion people.

10 years ago the Communist Party made a wager that a tough leader could keep them in power and make China stronger.

China wants to slow global warming and reduce carbon emissions. He repeated those goals in grandiose language this week. The principle that lucid waters and lush mountains are indispensable assets must be upheld and acted on. He and Putin agree on one thing: that Putin’s actions threaten to throw the global climate fight in reverse.

China experienced its most prolonged heat wave since 1961, this summer, during which the temperatures were the highest in two months. The Yangtze River dried to a trickle. Factories halted production to reduce the burden on power grids. The government’s chief forecaster, Chen Lijuan, told a Communist Party news outlet that the extreme highs could become a “new normal.”

Please accept my country’s gratitude and congratulations as you embark on your third term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Though it may not be obvious now, we believe your reign will one day be recognized as one of the great unexpected blessings in the history of the United States, as well as that of other free nations.

The Communist Party dispatched top officials in order to deal with the growing political crisis in Wuhan, as anger grew about the handling of the first coronavirus outbreak. The leader of the group stayed for three months, rallying local staff and procuring protective gear to help health workers and patients.

Ms. Sun warned that anyone deserting the war against the virus would be branded with history’s shame forever.

The China Mobile Phone Health Codes & Health System: From Social Control to Public Safety in the Light of China’s First Month Out in Beijing

The role that she has become accustomed to is driving the Communist Party’s will and bearing the country’s criticism. “Women most of the time get pushed to the frontline when male politicians don’t want to deal with a crisis,” said Hanzhang Liu, assistant professor of politics at Pitzer College.

Consumers can shop, eat, and travel more easily with China’s online platform that is run on mobile phone superapps and ubiquitousQR codes. Now, those technologies play a role in constraining daily life.

In order to track citizens and give control over their movement in China, a system of mobile phone health codes have been put in place.

Across the country, basic activities like going to the grocery store, riding public transport, or entering an office building depend on holding an up-to-date, negative Covid test and not being flagged as a close contact of a patient – data points reflected by a color code.

Going out in public can be a risk in itself, as being placed under quarantine or barricaded by authorities into a mall or office building as part of a snap lockdown could simply depend on whether someone in the general vicinity ends up testing positive.

“(You see) all the flaws of big data when it has control over your daily life,” said one Shanghai resident surnamed Li, who spent a recent afternoon scrambling to prove he didn’t need to quarantine after a tracking system pinned his wife to a location near to where a positive case had been detected.

When Li went to visit his wife, he didn’t receive a message, so they ended up going to a hotline and explaining their situation.

The editorial in the People’s Daily was one of three like ones released by the party last week in an apparent effort to lower public expectations about any future policy changes.

In a recent thread on the internet, a person asked if they would not be on the late night bus one day, receiving more than 100,000 likes before it was taken down.

Last week, a rare political protest in Beijing saw banners hung from a bridge along the capital’s busy Third Ring Road that zoned in on social controls under the policy.

The opening of the five yearly leadership reshuffle of the Communist Party took place on Sunday, and it was attended by 2,300 mostly surgical-mask clad party members.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/china/china-party-congress-xi-jinping-zero-covid-intl-hnk/index.html

The role of Covid-19 in China’s social media and financial crisis: a critical assessment of the first two years of Communist Party rule

The impact of those controls is getting worse, as they’ve left people without access to food and medicine, and struggling with lost income and mental toll.

Local authorities around the country put in place more controls in the run up to the Party Congress so they didn’t get into trouble during the big political event.

“Maintaining the zero-Covid strategy is now substantially more costly than it was a year ago, because the latest (viral) strains are so much more transmissible and outbreaks are occurring more frequently,” said epidemiologist Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.

There will be significant consequences if you back away from the policy. Allowing the virus to spread within the country of 1.4 billion would likely increase Covid-19 deaths to unseen levels in the country, experts say – and China so far has staked its policy around preventing those outcomes at all costs.

It’s not unusual for experts to say that keeping tight controls and closed borders is just delaying the inevitable, as the virus will stay in circulation beyond China, so they recommend preparing through raising elderly vaccination rates and increasing hospital capacity, as well as getting or expanding access to the most effective vaccines

China has relied on self-produced vaccine which is less protective against disease than the one developed in the West.

“The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Already the health code system has been used to diffuse social protest – with petitioners who lost their savings in rural banks barred from protesting after their health codes inexplicably turned red.

Communist Party rule of China has been punctuated by one mass public campaign after another, each designed to commandeer Chinese minds in service of the state.

During the tumultuous 1980s, the general secretary of the party is a fascinating character in the eyes of Gewirtz. To import foreign ideas and technology, and to dis associate the party with a blemished legacy of Chairman Mao Zedong are among the things that the sympathetic officials and Zhao argued for.

Some of China’s once richest technology firms have been hit by sanctions by the United States, causing new challenges for the party. Will the party survive another round? The Chinese economy is self-hobbled by Covid controls, its technology firms bound by dramatic American export restrictions, and its officials sanctioned over the country’s possibly crimes against humanity in the Xinjiang region, and it has been hampered by a nasty dose of nationalism.

The episode that brought Hu’s resignation to office: a public power play or a disgraced deputy? View from China on Channel News Asia and Twitter

Images of two men shepherding Hu from his seat and toward the exit were beamed all over the world, sparking a debate over whether Hu was the victim of a public power play.

Tuesday’s footage has fueled fervent speculation about what was in the document and why Hu was not allowed to see it – and left observers divided over what sparked his exit.

The footage, released by Channel NewsAsia on Tuesday, shows a series of high-level exchanges between senior party leaders, in which Hu is repeatedly prevented from looking at official documents in front of him.

It shows Li Zhanshu, the party’s third official, taking Hu’s documents from his hand and placing them under a red folder. Li pulls the documents away from Hu.

The senior aide was summonsed by the leader who was sitting on Hu’s side. Soon after, a second aide hurries over to get an instruction from the leader of the country.

None of the footage – either that released on Saturday or Tuesday – has been broadcast in China. The incident has not been discussed on Chinese social media and in Chinese language media.

Late on Saturday night, China’s official Xinhua news agency tweeted in English that Hu “insisted on attending” the closing ceremony despite his poor health and was escorted out after feeling unwell. The incident was not mentioned in China, where it’s not allowed.

Meanwhile, gone with Hu are the many hallmarks that had defined his decade in power during which he presided over a period of double-digit economic growth and comparative openness.

After two terms of power, Hu retired from the military and party, earning praise from the leader of the republic for his broad mind and noble character.

The new video is thought to be a sign that Hu is unhappy with the outcome of the congress which saw him consolidate his power and install his loyal allies.

The unofficial retirement age for Politburo Standing Committee members is not much lower than that of the premier and Wang Yang, who retired at the tender age of 66. Both Li and Wang can be seen as Hu’s closest allies.

The Politburo dropped Vice PM Hu Chunhua, another of Hu’s cronies, from the group on Sunday, even as it became clear that the two are unrelated. Once seen as a rising star being groomed for the top leadership, Hu Chunhua’s political future has dimmed under Xi.

But Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist at the Australian National University, said a planned public purge at the closing of the congress was unlikely, given the party’s emphasis on unity.

If Xi had wanted to purge Hu to prevent the former leader from raising objections in public, he would have done so before foreign press were allowed into the auditorium, Sung said.

Many observers were also struck by the apparent coldness of the other leaders on the stage. Few showed any concern for Hu, and many avoided looking in his direction.

To rise through the party, officials have learned to hide their personal emotions and characteristics, Wu said, “They just try to be like a machine in the party machinery.”

On his way out, Hu patted the shoulder of his protege, Premier Li, who nodded and turned briefly to watch him walk away. Wang was next to Li and looked frozen in motion.

Hu didn’t look at the party elder as he passed by. Instead, he looked straight ahead with a notable frown and arms folded across his chest.

But even if the real reason for the elder Hu’s departure never becomes clear, the incident has nevertheless sent an unequivocal message about Xi’s absolute hold on power, analysts say.

Hu’s undignified exit showed that “Xi had reduced the once powerful (Communist) Youth League faction to insignificance,” said Tsang at the University of London.

“With no successor in sight, and the previous leader humiliated, Xi had projected to the party that…no one in the party should look over his shoulder for another leader, be him the future or the past leader,” Tsang said.

The hardware tech executive said that the great country is falling into an abyss under the leader of this dictator. “But you can’t do anything about it. It hurts and depresses me.

Many businesspeople have lost a lot of money under “zero-Covid,” which has shuttered cities and locked millions of people in their homes for weeks at a time as the government seeks to eliminate the coronavirus.

When China was Locked Down: A Conversation with a Silicon Valley Techfounder after the Chinese Communist Party Reheating Party and the First Congressional Election

Despite many conversations over the years, we never talked about politics. He talked about his political depression after the congress. He said he used to believe that the Chinese were the most hard-working people in the world. He and many of his friends spend most of their time outside. He said that they were too depressed to work.

A year ago he was going to take his start-up public because it was doing so well. Then he lost a big chunk of his revenues and his new hires sat idly with nothing to do when cities were locked down under the “zero-Covid” rules. He said he has to sell his business and lay off more than 100 employees, so he can move his family to North America.

The tech founder from Beijing sent me a text after the party congress. In May, when there were rumors that Beijing could be locked down, he felt he could not tell his employees to leave work early and stock up on groceries. He was worried that he could be reported for spreading rumors — something that had gotten people detained by the police. He told them only that they should feel free to leave early if they had things to take care of.