China in Late 2025. By David Archibald.
Things in China haven’t turned out exactly as expected. Xi Jinping remains General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and so on. The reason he remains in place is because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) thinks their grip on power is too fragile to withstand a coup. Regime legitimacy, in the absence of good economic results, might vanish. The people who plotted against Xi had just not wanted to be killed in his consolidation of power; none of them wanted the top job as an end in itself….
As to who is running China now, that would be the surviving top general, Zhang Youxia, and a collective leadership centred in the party elders. …
Xi’s Praetorian Guard defenestrated:
Xi’s loyalists continue to be removed from the system. The latest is a bloke called Zhang Shujuan who had served Xi for 22 years, most recently as Director of the General Office of the Central Military Commission. In that role he was Xi’s eyes and ears in the PLA. Zhang arranged that his mother become the monopoly supplier of tea to the PLA. Both were recently arrested but Zhang’s wife and children were untouched. …
One of the things that this Zhang would have been aware of is that Xi had established a military unit in Langfang, Hebei Province that reported directly to him and operated outside the rest of the PLA. He had established his own Praetorian Guard. It was a big unit too as some 3,000 officers were removed from their posts on 27th October, suggesting that it was a division in strength. To paraphrase Stalin’s question on how many divisions the Pope had, Xi had at least one, personally. …
How Xi overtook Pelosi:
In 2012, a Bloomberg report assessed the Xi family wealth at US$376 million, much the same as Nancy Pelosi’s US$413 million at the end of her political career. That was before Xi had the power of life and death over his countrymen. Now it is rumoured to be in the tens of billions with a lot of that shifted out of the country. How his family’s wealth explosion was accomplished is illustrated by what happened to the Shenzhen metro system. Real estate development over metro lines has been a profitable business in China for the last 20 years. Some developers have even put in fake entrances to make it look like there is going to be access to the metro system. A company associated with Xi’s elder sister was given a 40% free-carried interest in Shenzhen Metro Group. …
Thhhhis close:
Xi might have succeeded in achieving a Putin-style dictatorship for life had he not been a heavy drinker earlier in his career. In drinking sessions with cronies, he would put away a bottle of maotai at a time. More recently, while Xi was in hospital being treated for heart problems ultimately caused by that drinking, General Zhang, realising that he would be purged by Xi, started inviting party elders to his home for dinner. They found common ground and were able to out-purge and delegitimise Xi.
David has his own SubStack now — check it out.