Four Feng Shui Coordinates: Why Did Xi Jinping Mobilize the Party and Government Apparatus to Build Family Feng Shui? | [Yaoyaojiang]

The video discusses the four geographical coordinates of the family of Xi Jinping—the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum in Fuping, Shaanxi; the Xi Clan Ancestral Hall in Dengzhou, Henan; Liangjiahe in Shaanxi; and the Qinling Mountains. It analyzes the connections between these locations and traditional feng shui politics, imperial mausoleum specifications, and national destiny, pointing out that the rise of feng shui politics reflects regime legitimacy anxiety and internal ideological exhaustion.

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Hello everyone, I am Yaoyaojiang. In Fuping, Shaanxi, there is a mausoleum covering an area of 150 mu, which is nine times the size of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. In Dengzhou, Henan, there is an ancestral hall where more than 1,000 mu of surrounding arable land was demarcated by the local government into the ancestral hall's perimeter. Official promotional materials state that it has been a "geomantic treasure land since ancient times." In Yan'an County, Shaanxi, there is an ordinary educated youth settlement certified by local party media as the "birthplace of Chinese civilization," the "hometown of Fuxi," and the "birthplace of the Taiji Eight Trigrams." The Qinling Mountains, stretching across central China, were repeatedly instructed on six consecutive times by the top leader from 2014 to 2018. These four places share a commonality: they are all related to the family of Xi Jinping. Connecting them together is an invisible feng shui political map institutionally executed by the party-and-state machinery. Why does a political party that writes the "elimination of feudal superstition" into its party constitution have such a map? Today, we are going to talk about the political feng shui of the Xi family.

At the entrance of the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum in the Pottery Art Village of Fuping County, Shaanxi, a visitor must do three things to enter: first, present an ID card; second, store all backpacks in a fingerprint-locked locker; and third, undergo a scan by a metal detector, comparable to airport security. Xi Zhongxun's highest position during his lifetime was Vice Premier and Secretary-General of the State Council, and Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress—a sub-national level rank—and he never served on the Politburo Standing Committee. According to the CCP's own funeral protocol conventions, after the death of a leader of this rank, their ashes are generally placed in the columbarium of the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery. When Xi Zhongxun passed away in May 2002, his ashes were indeed placed there without an independent cemetery, which was consistent with his rank. However, fast forward three years to May 24, 2005, the 13th anniversary of his death, and his ashes were moved from Babaoshan to a newly built mausoleum in the Pottery Art Village of Fuping County, Shaanxi. At that time, the cemetery occupied only 8 mu and its scale was not ostentatious. However, fast forward another seven years to 2012, when two things happened. The first was in May 2012, half a year before the 18th National Congress, when a man named Jing Junhai was appointed as a member of the Standing Committee of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee and Head of the Publicity Department. The second was six months later in November, when Xi Jinping was elected General Secretary of the CCP Central Committee at the 18th National Congress. The first major task Jing Junhai undertook after taking office was to initiate a large-scale expansion of the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum. At that time, the Secretary of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee was Zhao Leji, but the specific planning and execution of the mausoleum expansion were led entirely by Jing Junhai. By the time the expansion was completed in September 2015, the mausoleum had grown from 8 mu to 150 mu, nearly twenty times its original size. This scale means that the area of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum is only about one-ninth of his, and the core forest area of the Ming Dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang's tomb is about one-fourth of his. An elder who never entered the Standing Committee during his lifetime, held sub-national rank, and was originally placed in the Babaoshan Cemetery, was buried after his death with a scale nine times that of Sun Yat-sen and four times that of the Ming founder's Xiaoling Mausoleum. This is unprecedented in the history of the CCP. The only top CCP leaders with independent mausoleums are Hu Yaobang and Hua Guofeng, and Hua Guofeng's mausoleum occupies only a little over 2,000 square meters. But the land area is only the surface; the real issue lies in the design of the mausoleum, which strictly follows the feng shui standards of traditional imperial tombs.

To understand this design, one must first clarify a concept of feng shui. The specific orientation of the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum, in feng shui terminology, is the four characters "Qian Shan Xun Xiang" (Qian Mountain, Xun Direction), which simply means facing southeast with one's back to the northwest. Traditional Chinese feng shui divides the 360-degree orientation into eight directions, each corresponding to a hexagram. The northwest corresponds to the Qian hexagram, representing heaven, the father, and the supreme power of the monarch. The southeast corresponds to the Xun hexagram, representing wind, growth, flow, and continuity. A building that has its back to the northwest and faces the southeast is called "Qian Shan Xun Xiang." This layout has a special name: "Heaven's Gate and Earth's Portal." The northwest is the Heaven's Gate, and the southeast is the Earth's Portal. With one's back to the Heaven's Gate and facing the Earth's Portal, one connects the energy of heaven and earth, allowing the yang energy to flow in continuously and then flow to the descendants through the Earth's Portal. This is not an ordinary extreme layout; it is a layout prepared for monarchs, ancestors, and the founders of a dynasty. There is a classic book in feng shui called "Tian Yu Jing" (Classic of Heavenly Jade), which contains a sentence that everyone who has studied feng shui has memorized: "Qian Shan, Xun Xiang, water flows, Qian Feng produces a Zhuangyuan (top scholar)." This means that this orientation produces top-tier figures who rank at the pinnacle of the imperial court and act as leaders. According to the feng shui cycle of the "Eight Periods" that began in 2004, looking at the 20-year cycle from 2004 to 2023, this Qian Mountain...

The option is known as one of the strongest patterns in Wan'an Wanxiang, where the main star is prosperous, producing great nobility. This may also be the reason for choosing the year 2005, from the burial at Babaoshan to Fuping County, Shaanxi. This 20-year period perfectly covers the entire process of Xi Jinping's rise to the top and the consolidation of his power. He took over in 2012, the cemetery expansion was completed in 2015, the 19th National Congress was held in 2017, the constitution was amended in 2018 to abolish term limits, and he secured a third term in 2022. However, orientation alone is not enough; Feng Shui speaks of a complete set, requiring three elements to be gathered, known as the mountain sitting and orientation. The Xi Zhongxun cemetery possesses all three. It sits against Qiaoshan to the north, faces the Wenquan River to the south, and sits northwest facing southeast; this is a textbook-level pattern of mountain-gazing and orientation. But the name of the mountain behind it also carries special weight. The mountain the cemetery backs onto is called Qiaoshan. The Records of the Grand Historian: Annals of the Five Emperors records that "the Yellow Emperor is buried in Qiaoshan," and the mountain where the Yellow Emperor is located is called Qiaoshan. We must clarify that the Qiaoshan mentioned there is in Huangling County, Shaanxi, and is not the same mountain as this one in Fuping. According to the Erya: Explaining Mountains, there is more than one mountain in China called Qiaoshan. Fuping does indeed have a local Qiaoshan, but in the narrative of Feng Shui, the name itself is invoking cultural energy. Once these two characters are spoken, what Chinese people first think of is the Imperial Mausoleum, the ancestral spirit of the Chinese nation. The designer's choice to back onto a mountain also called Qiaoshan is an act of invoking all the cultural energy of ancestral spirits, progenitors, and the roots of the Chinese nation through this shared name. To the south of the cemetery is a river called the Wenquan River. The ancient Feng Shui book Zangshu states, "In the method of Feng Shui, virtuous water is the best, and stagnant water is secondary. Virtuous water is more important than blocking the wind." Water nourishes wealth and wood; having water directly in front is called the water of the Mingtang, and it is best if it is living, flowing water that carries a warm character, like the Wenquan River. The name itself conforms to the description of auspicious water in Feng Shui. These are not conspiracy theories interpreted by later generations, but designs actively showcased by the project developers. During the 2014 Chinese Lunar New Year, Duowei News, a CCP overseas propaganda media outlet that was still operating in mainland China at the time, sent reporters to visit the Xi Zhongxun cemetery in Fuping. In the report brought back by the reporters, there was a quote directly from the park management staff, stating that every blade of grass, every tree, and every position inside the cemetery was very carefully considered, and basically, none of it was detached from Feng Shui. This was the cemetery's own explanation to the public. In other words, the fact that the cemetery was designed according to Feng Shui standards was already a public fact in 2014, before the expansion was even completed. The cemetery management actively told the visiting overseas propaganda reporters; it was not something interpreted later by overseas media, but something the project developers actively did, actively displayed, and actively admitted. And the person responsible for the specific execution of this Feng Shui design was the then-head of the Publicity Department of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee, Jiang Yunhai.

I am not saying that the orientation of a cemetery can truly determine political destiny; friends can make that judgment for themselves. What I want to say is something else: the people who approved the design and accepted this mausoleum believe in this kind of causality. Otherwise, there is no reason to design the tomb of a CCP elder strictly according to the traditions of imperial mausoleums. Upon entering the mausoleum, there is a seated statue of Xi Zhongxun in the center, with a stone tablet on each side. The one on the right is inscribed with Xi Zhongxun's own motto: "A life of struggle, a life of happiness." The one on the left is inscribed with Mao Zedong's 1943 inscription for Xi Zhongxun: "The interests of the Party come first." The inscription itself is a historical fact, but placing this Mao Zedong inscription in the form of a stone tablet in the very center of the mausoleum is not merely a matter of historical experience. This is directly linking Xi Zhongxun's political legitimacy to Mao Zedong. The mausoleum tells all visitors that Xi Zhongxun is not an ordinary elder at the vice-national level; he is an elder personally certified by Mao Zedong. And what his son inherited is not just bloodline, but the next link in that chain of certification from Mao Zedong. The main cause emphasized in Feng Shui is translated here into a physical monument of political lineage. Let us return to the official who took office in May 2012 as the head of the Publicity Department of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee and oversaw the expansion of the mausoleum. His subsequent career trajectory is the clearest case of the return on investment in Feng Shui politics. Two months after the mausoleum expansion was completed in July 2015, Jing Junhai was transferred to become the Deputy Head of the Publicity Department of the CCP Central Committee. In April 2017, he was promoted to Deputy Party Secretary of Beijing. In October of the same year, he became an alternate member of the 19th Central Committee. In January 2018, he was transferred to become the Governor of Jilin Province. In November 2020, he was promoted to Party Secretary of Jilin Province. A local official who was originally just the head of the Publicity Department of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee made a three-level jump within five years, entering the ranks of high-ranking regional officials. But the story has a second half. On June 28, 2024, Jing Junhai was suddenly removed from his post as Party Secretary of Jilin Province. At the time, he was only sixty-three years old, not yet at the retirement age of sixty-five for ministerial-level officials. In CCP politics, such early removal usually means something has gone wrong. Three months later, he was placed in the position of Vice Chairman of the Education, Science, Culture and Public Health Committee of the National People's Congress, which is a quiet, idle post. In November 2025 and January 2016, overseas media reported twice that he had been taken away by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection for investigation. However, one detail is worth noting: to this day, the authorities have not announced any charges against him, have not included him in any anti-corruption reports, and have not expelled him from the Party. A ministerial-level official who has been repeatedly reported by overseas media and taken away by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection still retains his status within the system, retains his ministerial-level treatment, and is placed in this idle position at the NPC Education, Science, Culture and Public Health Committee. This kind of handling has a specific political linguistic meaning in CCP politics: saving face, and balancing merits with faults. An official who once performed meritorious service for Xi Jinping's father, even if considered to have had problems, received treatment different from other fallen officials. The weight of this mausoleum in Xi Jinping's eyes is enough for Jing Junhai to offset his faults with his merits. Let us return to the security check at the entrance of the mausoleum. Does a patriotic education base need this level of security? There are thousands of patriotic education bases in China, and the vast majority can be entered by simply scanning one's face nearby. But the identity of every person entering the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum must be recorded, and every item must be checked. The popular explanation is that it is to prevent petitioners from distributing leaflets at the tomb. But one thing is certain: a mausoleum for a CCP elder that requires security standards for petitioners itself indicates a certain deep-seated anxiety. If it were just about respecting history and commemorating an elder, this level of security would not be needed. Here, the outline of this mausoleum in Fuping becomes clear. A vice-national level mausoleum covering an area larger than Sun Yat-sen's Mausoleum, designed strictly according to Feng Shui, using Mao Zedong's inscription inside to link political legitimacy to the source of CCP legitimacy, with security specifications exceeding any ordinary memorial park. These five facts together raise a question: why would the highest leadership group of the Communist Party, which repeatedly criticizes feudal superstition, build a mausoleum for the father of a former leader that is designed strictly according to imperial Feng Shui standards?

The answer to this question is to go 600 kilometers southeast to Dengzhou, Henan. There is an ancestral hall there, and the official introductory materials of the ancestral hall contain six characters: "Since ancient times, internal rising water Baoding Henan Province Dengzhou City Shilin formation village in a general village in the southwest, the village is about 2,780 mouths, arable land is 3,250 mu." This place, which looks no different from any agricultural village in China, has an ancestral hall with a battlefield of more than 1,000 mu, called the Xingshi Ancestral Hall. On the way into the village, tourists first saw a huge stone monument, on the front of which was engraved a sentence personally written on February 27, 2004, by Xi Jinping, then secretary of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee, to all the fathers and fellow villagers of the new village: "The hometown of the navy, the more the hometown is the original hometown." That year, Xi Jinping was 51 years old and had just been transferred from Fujian to Zhejiang, 1 year and a half, and had not yet entered the top decision-making level of the Party. But he was doing one thing, which was to confirm that his ancestral home was not Fuping, Shaanxi, but Dengzhou, Henan. According to Xi Zhongxun's own words before his life, the migration route of this Xi family is like this: In 1369, the 2nd year of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty, a man named Xi Su moved from Jiangxi Jiangxi Prefecture Shinkansen to Dengzhou, Henan, and settled in the village by the Swallow River, which is later the study camp village. In 1882, the 8th year of Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty, the 15th generation pregnancy that Xi Su entered, namely Xi Zhongxun's grandfather Xing Chuansheng, because of a famine, took his family to flee from Dengzhou to Fuping, Shaanxi. That is to say, this family information lived in Dengzhou for 513 years, and in Fuping for less than 140 years. According to the traditional Chinese definition of ancestral home, where does a family live the longest? Where is the ancestral grave? Where is the ancestral hall? Then Dengzhou is the true ancestral home of the Xi family. Xi Zhongxun said a sentence to his children many times before his life: "You must remember that we have three homes: one is Fuping, Shaanxi, one is Dengzhou, Henan, and one is Beijing." Xi Jinping himself specifically said during the 2004 National Two Sessions that Dengzhou is his place of roots and seeking ancestors, which is public material. But the key to the matter is not the ancestral home itself, but what kind of place Xingcun is. A passage in the original text of the official introduction material of the ancestral hall management committee is like this: "Leaning north to the remaining veins of the 800-li Funiu Mountain, it is difficult to walk to Lingshan, and the Yanzihe, a tributary of the Han River, has been a geomantic treasure land since ancient times." Since ancient times, it is a geomantic treasure land. These seven characters are the official texts recognized by the Dengzhou Situation Ancestral Hall Management Committee and the local government. This is neither a folk rumor nor a network joke. This county-level municipal government ruled by the Communist Party publicly recognized this place as a geomantic treasure land in the ancestral home of a Communist Party general secretary, and this matter itself needs to be explained. Because geomancy has been a criticized feudal superstition remnant in the official discourse of the CCP since 1949, and in the decades from the breakup to reform and opening up, the official has never openly recognized the geomantic value of any place. It was not until after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 that this official expression appeared. Lingshan and Yanzihe mentioned in the inscription are not casually named. The mountain on the north side of the village is called Lingshan, and this forest has a special weight in Chinese, which does not refer to ordinary mountains, but to mountains with gods, aura, and the ability to close descendants. Yanzihe on the south side of the village is a tributary of the Han River, and the Han River is one of the most important tributaries of the Yangtze River, and it is also the river in traditional Chinese culture that has sweat, perseverance, and light. The Milky Way in the sky corresponds to the sweat on the ground. In the narrative of geomancy, the tributary of the Han River in the new village is difficult to understand, which is equivalent to having heavenly rivers flowing past the south, leaning north to Lingshan, and Nanning Yanzihe is the exact same geomantic configuration as the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum in Fuping. The principle is different, Fuping, just a small-scale geomancy of a cemetery, while Dengzhou is the large-scale geomancy of the whole village. Entering the Xingshi Ancestral Hall, twenty meters behind the main hall is the migration ancestor of this branch of Xingshi, that is, the joint burial tomb of Xi Su. The tomb is 6 meters high and 38 meters in circumference. This number has a clear reference system in the ritual system of the Ming Dynasty. According to the Ming Dynasty's regulations on official wooden objects in the Will Meet of the Great Ming, the wooden quality of a first-rank official is one zhang and eight chi high, which is converted according to the construction ruler of the Ming Dynasty, about 5.76 meters. A second-rank official is one zhang and four chi, about 4.48 meters. When Xi Su signed to Dengzhou in 1369, he was just an ordinary immigrant who opened up wasteland and farmed, without any official position. According to his actual identity, his tomb should not have any standardized wind and earth. But now his tomb is 6 meters high, and this number far exceeds the wooden quality standard of a first-rank official stipulated by the Great Ming Dynasty. At present, there is a stone tablet from the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, and this stone tablet is truly proof that this tomb did exist in the Qing Dynasty. But it needs to be pointed out that this tomb was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. It was rebuilt by the voluntary fund-raising of the Xi clan in 2004. From 2005 to 2009, the local government led a large-scale expansion. That is to say, the current 6-meter-high and 38-meter-circumference wind and earth is the form after the reconstruction in 2004 and the expansion from 2005 to 2009, not the form when Xi Su was buried in 1369. The time point of 2009 happens to be the second year after Xi Jinping was elected as the Vice President of the State and became the crown prince, 3 years away from his appointment as the general secretary. The tomb of an ordinary Ming Dynasty immigrant was rebuilt into a wind and earth exceeding the regular first-rank specification of the Ming Dynasty in the second year after his twenty-second-generation grandson just became the Vice President of the State.

The shape is the gate of the ancestral hall, with a plaque hanging above it bearing four characters: "Wuzhou Xing Shi." The person who wrote the inscription is Qi Xin, the widow of Xi Zhongxun and the mother of Xi Jinping. According to traditional Chinese ancestral laws, writing an inscription for an ancestral hall is an extremely important matter; the calligrapher must be the family member with the highest seniority and the most prestige. Qi Xin's inscription for the Dengzhou Xing Shi ancestral hall means that she formally acknowledged this ancestral hall as the Xu family's ancestral hall, not just a casual memorial hall built by the local area, but a legitimate family sacrificial site certified by the highest elders of the Nanxi River. Qi Xin is an old Party member who joined the revolutionary ranks in 1939, and theoretically should not participate in any family activities with patriarchal color, yet she inscribed this plaque, and the format of the plaque strictly adhered to the highest specifications of traditional ancestral hall inscriptions: gold characters on a black background. Putting these facts together, the ancestral hall in Dengzhou New Village was not a one-sided flattery by local officials, but was participated in and certified by the Xu family themselves, with complete institutional arrangements, built as a family sacrificial site according to traditional patriarchal standards. More than 100 mu of arable land in front of the ancestral hall was incorporated into the ancestral hall's scope, plus hundreds of mu of green belts along the village entrance road, meaning that nearly half of the village's 3,250 mu of arable land was used to build a family ancestral hall. The local government's compensation plan was to subsidize villagers 800 yuan per mu per year, far below market value. The entire new village actually turned into an ancestral hall economic entity revolving around the Xing Shi ancestral hall. But interestingly, according to overseas Chinese media descriptions in 2021, the ancestral hall covers thousands of mu yet has few tourists and is deserted, the reason being that Xi Jinping himself does not allow the local government to use Xi Jinping's name as a signboards for massive propaganda. This posture of accepting without flaunting also perfectly matches the traditional Chinese family's attitude toward ancestors.

Ancestors cannot be flaunted, and cannot be peeked at by outsiders. A villager in the new village once said a sentence, which was recorded by overseas Chinese media, they said, "In the next 20 years, China will..." This matter is a rumor from the countryside, but the villagers daring to openly say such words is itself a signal. In a country ruled by the Communist Party, ordinary villagers publicly predicting in public that "China will be determined by Xi for the next 20 years" is extremely dangerous politically, because it implies the political imagination of a family天下 (dynastic state). But the villagers of Yingcun dared to say it, and did not suffer any punishment, because in their logic, what they said was the fact. And Dengzhou is not the end of this system. Traveling 400 kilometers further north to the Yan Chuan line in Yan'an, Shaanxi, there is another place, which is not the destination of ancestors, but the place where Xi Jinping himself started his career. The local official discourse directly hooked it to the source of Chinese civilization. That place is Liangjiahe.

Liangjiahe Village, northwest of the Loess Plateau in Yan'an City, Shaanxi Province, is an ordinary village with high mountains, distant roads, and crisscrossing gullies. According to local official descriptions, it is "no flat land for five or three feet, and you climb slopes as soon as you go out." In January 1969, a fifteen-year-old Xi Jinping arrived, lived here for 7 years, joined the Party here, and served as the brigade Party branch secretary here. In October 1975, he left Liangjiahe to study at Tsinghua University. According to the fate of all 15 million sent-down youth in China, Liangjiahe should have originally...

Shaanxi Province, Yan'an City. Liangjiahe Village, northwest of the Loess Plateau, is an ordinary village with high mountains, distant roads, and crisscrossing gullies. According to local official descriptions, there is no flat land for five or three feet, and you climb slopes as soon as you go out. In January 1969, a fifteen-year-old Xi Jinping arrived, lived here for 7 years, joined the Party here, and served as the brigade Party branch secretary here. In October 1975, he left Jiahe to study at Tsinghua University. According to the fate of all 15 million sent-down youth in China, Liangjiahe should have originally been an ordinary, unrecorded place name destined to be forgotten sooner or later. But starting in 2007, something happened.

The origin of the entire Liangjiahe myth dates back to a government inspection tour in 2006. That year, Li Xi, then member of the Standing Committee of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee and Secretary of the Yan'an Municipal Party Committee, led a delegation from Yan'an to Shanghai, bringing along the party secretaries and county magistrates of all subordinate counties under Yan'an. This event was even reported by the Chinese Communist Party News Network. For a party secretary of an inland prefecture-level city to lead a delegation consisting of all subordinate county party secretaries and magistrates to the country's largest economic center is extremely rare in routine administrative work. That year, the Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary was Xi Jinping. A year later, Liangjiahe village wrote a letter to Xi Jinping in the name of the villagers' committee. According to the date of Xi Jinping's personal reply letter on August 28, 2007, he was still the Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary, and it was only two months later at the 17th National Congress that he entered the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau and became Hu Jintao's successor. However, this was only the first letter and the first reply. The second time was on July 12, 2008, when Xi Jinping was already serving as Vice President of the PRC and member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau. The third reply was on May 2, 2011, and the fourth was on May 5, 2014, by which time Xi Jinping was already General Secretary and President. Every time the villagers wrote, Xi Jinping replied, and every reply became a subject of vigorous propaganda by the official media in Yan'an, with each campaign elevating Liangjiahe's political status by another notch. After Xi Jinping was elected General Secretary in 2012, Liangjiahe was developed into a tourist attraction and a Party-building education base. In February 2015, Xi Jinping personally returned to Liangjiahe, bringing his wife Peng Liyuan to visit the elders and local folks. To this day, Liangjiahe is one of the sacred sites of Chinese Communist Party-building education, with millions of people visiting every year. But the crux of the matter does not lie in Liangjiahe itself, but in how the sacred status of Liangjiahe was constructed.

Here I would like to quote an original description of the location of Liangjiahe from an official pro-Beijing Hong Kong media outlet. It says that Liangjiahe village belongs to Xiewen'anyi Town, which is located fifteen kilometers northwest of the county seat. Yanchuan County is a dazzling pearl by the Yellow River, the cradle of Chinese civilization, the source of Yellow River culture, and the hometown of Fuxi of the Chinese nation. The S-shaped Qiankun Bay formed by the winding Yellow River inspired Fuxi to invent the Taiji Eight Trigrams diagram, which, together with the theory of Yin and Yang, became the source of Chinese culture and Yellow River culture. Every word and sentence of this official intra-Party text is worth dissecting. The first sentence claims that Yanchuan County is the cradle of Chinese civilization and the source of Yellow River culture. In fact, according to the mainstream archaeological consensus in China, the cradle of Chinese civilization is the Central Plains region in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, specifically Dengfeng and Xinzheng in Henan, as well as the Guanzhong region in Shaanxi, following a continuous historical thread from the Peiligang culture, Longshan culture, to the Erlitou culture. Yanchuan County is located on the northern Shaanxi plateau and falls outside the traditional scope of the cradle of Chinese civilization.

As for the second sentence, it claims that Yanchuan is the hometown of Fuxi, the ancestor of the Chinese nation. According to traditional mythology and historical records, the main competing locations for Fuxi's hometown are Tianshui in Gansu, Huaiyang in Henan, and Jining in Shandong; Yanchuan in Shaanxi has never been on this list of competitors. The third sentence is the most crucial one: the S-shaped Qiankun Bay formed by the Yellow River inspired Fuxi to invent the Taiji Eight Trigrams diagram. Visually, this large S-shaped bend does indeed bear a strong resemblance to the Taiji diagram, but there are no historical documents recording that Fuxi ever visited Yanchuan, nor is there any archaeological evidence proving that he invented the Eight Trigrams diagram here. This claim is entirely a political construction made by the local government based on topographic similarity, yet it was written into the official introduction by the local authorities of Yanchuan County as a fact! Consequently, the assertion that Yanchuan County is the cradle of Chinese civilization was forcibly established. For if Yanchuan were just an ordinary county in northern Shaanxi, then Liangjiahe would merely be an ordinary sent-down youth settlement; but if Yanchuan is the cradle of Chinese civilization, the hometown of Fuxi, and the birthplace of the Taiji Eight Trigrams, then Liangjiahe can become the source of Chinese civilization. Thus, the 7 years Xi Jinping spent here are no longer just ordinary sent-down youth years, but a crucial spiritual pilgrimage where a General Secretary of the Communist Party accumulated his imperial dragon energy at the source of Chinese civilization.

Next to discuss is something that many people do not know, but which is extremely important: turning Liangjiahe into a sacred site was artificial, not naturally formed. In 2007, Li Xi, then Party Secretary of Yan'an, spearheaded and mobilized the Liangjiahe villagers to write to Xi Jinping. In 2008, Zhao Leji, then Party Secretary of Shaanxi, entrusted Li Xi to convey greetings to then Vice President Xi Jinping. In intra-Party political parlance, these two actions meant that even before Xi Jinping formally succeeded to power, Zhao Leji and Li Xi had already adopted serving Xi as their political line. Moreover, their service was not ordinary work reporting, but participation in constructing the political myth of Xi Jinping—specifically, participating in constructing the narrative of the Liangjiahe sacred site. In the era of Xi Jinping, this kind of action is more important than work performance, factional alignment, or personal relations, because such a gesture tells everyone, 'I acknowledge that you are the true Son of Heaven,' and such a gesture will be rewarded.

Fast forward to the 19th National Congress in 2017, Zhao Leji entered the Politburo Standing Committee and served as Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, ranking sixth in the Party. In 2022, at the 20th National Congress, Zhao Leji was re-elected to the Politburo Standing Committee and promoted to Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, ranking third in the Party. In 2022, Li Xi entered the Politburo Standing Committee at the 20th National Congress and served as Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, ranking seventh in the Party. These two Shaanxi local officials, who participated in the construction of the Liangjiahe holy site that year, one ranked third and the other seventh in the Party. This is not an accidental political promotion; it is a reward chain of Feng Shui politics.

Looking at this comprehensively, the cemetery in Fuping represents the father, the ancestral hall in Dengzhou represents the ancestors, and the cave dwelling in Liangjiahe represents himself. These three geographical coordinates, three eras, and three sets of Feng Shui narratives constitute a complete political myth of the trinity of the individual, the family, and the ancestors. But this is not enough. To make this trinity myth truly complete, it needs a total dragon vein that runs through all people, all families, and all eras. This dragon vein stretches across central China, extending 1,600 kilometers. Its name is known to everyone in the world: the Qinling Mountains.

Between 2014 and 2018, Xi Jinping himself issued six instructions regarding it. After July 2018, Chinese official media repeatedly publicized one thing: from his first instruction on May 13, 2014, to his sixth instruction in July 2018, Xi Jinping issued a total of six instructions regarding the issue of illegal villas in the Qinling Mountains. After the six instructions, Xu Lingyi, Deputy Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, led a team to station in Shaanxi, eventually demolishing 1,194 illegal villas, reclaiming 4,557 mu of state-owned land and 3,257 mu of collective land. Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee Secretary Zhao Zhengyong, former members of the Standing Committee of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee and Secretary-General, former Xi'an Mayor Shangguan Jiqing, and former Xi'an Municipal Party Committee Secretary Wei Minzhou—some were investigated, some resigned to take responsibility, and some were sentenced. The entire incident was even made into an official documentary titled "Grasping to the End: The Full Story of the Rectification of Illegal Construction in the Qinling Mountains," which aired on CCTV on January 9, 2019. According to the official narrative, this is a typical case of anti-corruption combined with ecological protection, reflecting Xi Jinping's work style of "not letting go until the end." However, there are several anomalies in the figures within the official narrative.

The first anomaly is the six instructions. For a top leader to issue six consecutive instructions on the specific local affairs of one county is, in the discourse of the CCP, highlighted and publicized repeatedly as a bright spot. According to the work practices of the General Office of the CCP Central Committee, after a General Secretary makes an important instruction on a certain task, it is usually the responsibility of the provincial or ministerial level to implement it. If the implementation is ineffective, it is handled through channels such as the Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Organization Department, and inspection teams. The General Secretary himself would not repeatedly issue instructions on the same matter. Yet, for the illegal villas in the Qinling Mountains, Xi Jinping issued six consecutive instructions over a period of more than four years from May 2014 to July 2018, averaging one instruction every eight months. This intensity of continuous intervention has no precedent in publicly reported CCP documents.

The second anomaly is the linguistic intensity of the instructions. The key sentence in Xi Jinping's sixth instruction began with "starting from political discipline, thoroughly investigate and rectify, paying lip service while acting differently, and then not feeling the problem." Note the four words "political discipline." In the CCP's discourse system, political discipline is the highest level of discipline within the Party, more serious than work discipline, lifestyle discipline, or clean governance discipline. If a cadre violates political discipline, it means that not only was the work not done well, but there was a problem with their political stance and political positioning. The illegal villas in the Qinling Mountains appeared on the surface to be an ecological protection issue, but Xi Jinping insisted on defining it as a matter of political discipline. This definition elevated the nature of the entire incident from an environmental protection case to one of political positioning.

The third anomaly is Xi Jinping's remark in 2020. On April 20, 2020, while inspecting the Qinling Niubeiliang National Nature Reserve, according to Xinhua News Agency, he told local cadres that the illegal construction in the Qinling Mountains was a "great lesson," and from now on, to be a cadre in Shaanxi, one must first understand this lesson and never repeat the same mistakes. The limitation of this statement is very critical; Xi Jinping defined the illegal construction in the Qinling Mountains as an original sin that all Shaanxi cadres must be vigilant against. This level of linguistic intensity is also almost unprecedented in the history of the CCP.

Looking at the three anomalies together: for the sake of the Qinling Mountains, Xi Jinping issued six instructions, elevated a common environmental protection incident to the height of political discipline, and raised the whole affair to the level of a political original sin for Shaanxi cadres and the public. None of these three things can be explained by environmental protection or anti-corruption. There is only one explanation that can make these three anomalies hold true simultaneously: the Qinling Mountains are not just an ordinary mountain range, and the illegal construction in the Qinling Mountains is not just an ordinary illegal case. The true meaning of this incident still lies in Feng Shui. In the first chapter, when we talked about the selection of the front mountain, we mentioned the concept of the dragon vein. Feng Shui theory holds that mountain ranges are like the body of a dragon, undulating and continuous, starting from a source and extending to all parts of the country, carrying the flow of energy (Qi) to every place.

Traditional Chinese Feng Shui theory holds that all dragon veins across the country originate from a common ancestor, the Kunlun Mountains. Setting out from the Kunlun Mountains, there are three main dragon veins known as the Three Great Dragon Veins. The Northern Dragon goes north from the Kunlun Mountains, passing through the Qilian Mountains, Yanshan Mountains, and Changbai Mountains into the sea; the Central Dragon goes east from the Kunlun Mountains, passing through what is now the Qinling Mountains and Dabie Mountains into the sea; and the Southern Dragon goes south from the Kunlun Mountains, passing through the mountains and Nanling Mountains into the sea. The Qinling Mountains form the main body of China's dragon. According to Feng Shui, the China Dragon is the most noble of the three great master dragons because it is located in the center of China's territory, stretching 1,600 kilometers from east to west, and has been the core area of Chinese civilization since ancient times. An article titled "The Great Qinling Mountains, The Great Culture, The National Vein" on the official website of the Shaanxi Provincial Library contains the following description of the Qinling Mountains: "The Qinling dragon vein originates from the Kunlun Mountains and is known as the Central Dragon among the Kunlun three great dragon veins. Its significance is extraordinary, peerless, and possesses an imperial aura that overlooks the world." This is not some folk Feng Shui website, but the official website of a government agency, the Shaanxi Provincial Library. In other words, the official authorities of Shaanxi Province publicly acknowledge the imperial aura of the Qinling Mountains overlooking the world.

Connecting the Feng Shui status of the Qinling Mountains with Yao'an, which lies to the north of the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum, Fuping where the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum's northern backing is located, and Yaoshan locally, geographically belongs to the extension of the Qinling Mountains, the dragon vein of China. In other words, the Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum was designed along the energy extension line of China's dragon vein, while the main body of the Qinling Mountains, which has been repeatedly protected and defended by Xi Jinping himself through six instructions since 2018, is the source of this dragon vein. Connecting its core mausoleum with the main body of the Qinling Mountains forms a complete chain; if any section is destroyed, this chain is broken. The illegal villas in the Qinling Mountains were destroying this dragon vein. According to traditional Feng Shui, destroying the dragon vein means destroying China's national fortune. This is why Xi Jinping issued six instructions and characterized the matter using political discipline, because for someone who believes in Feng Shui, illegal construction in the Qinling Mountains is tantamount to breaking ground on the lifeline of his own family.

Some might object, saying that Xi Jinping's emphasis on ecological protection is genuine and nationwide, because it is not limited to the Qinling Mountains. Indeed, in 2001, Xi Jinping also issued an important instruction regarding ecological damage issues in the Qilian Mountains Nature Reserve, but the comparison in handling intensity between the two cases is as follows. The Qilian Mountains underwent concentrated rectification in 2017, with a large number of illegal projects demolished. As for the Qinling Mountains, there were six instructions from 2014 to 2018, and the rectification lasted for more than 4 years. In the Qilian Mountains, local officials were held accountable, whereas in the Qinling Mountains, the provincial party secretary, members of the provincial party standing committee, municipal party secretaries, and mayors were all purged. The handling intensity of the two ecological protection incidents differed by an order of magnitude. According to official explanations, this is because the illegal construction in the Qinling Mountains lasted longer, the scale of destruction was larger, and local governments showed more serious superficial compliance. This explanation has factual backing, but there is another interpretation: the Qilian Mountains are the extension of the Northern Dragon, and the destruction of the Northern Dragon is ordinary territory destruction, whereas the Qinling Mountains belong to the China Dragon, which is directly related to the family Feng Shui line of the Xi family. The severity of the two events in the dimension of Feng Shui was never on the same order of magnitude, and Xi Jinping's handling intensity precisely corresponds to this difference in severity.

At this point, four geographical coordinates can be connected into a complete map. The Xi Zhongxun Mausoleum in Fuping, Shaanxi corresponds to the ancestral grave intended to bless future generations with prosperity; the ancestral temple in Zhengzhou, Henan corresponds to the ancestral temple for establishing family legitimacy; Liangjiachao in Qichun County, Shaanxi corresponds to the dragon's lair, which is the birthplace of the person himself; and the main body of the Qinling Mountains corresponds to the national vein, which is where the country's fortune lies. The four positions precisely correspond to the four key elements required by traditional Feng Shui for a family to rule the world, and each position has received official endorsement from party and government organs.

When the four coordinates are connected into a complete four-in-one chart of ancestral grave, ancestral temple, dragon star, and national vein, we must answer the core question we raised earlier: why would a political party founded on the basis of anti-feudalism, superstition eradication, and atheism have a supreme leader who deeply believes in Feng Shui? What does this paradox mean? Since the founding of the PRC by the CCP in 1949, opposing feudalism, eradicating superstition, and opposing patriarchal society have been among the basic ideologies of this regime. From the destruction of the Four Olds to the Cultural Revolution in the Mao Zedong era, a large number of ancestral halls, ancestral graves, and family genealogies across the country were demolished, burned, and criticized. This was not a spontaneous folk behavior, but a unified deployment by the party. After Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up, although anti-feudalism was no longer radical, opposing feudal superstition remained part of the CCP's official rhetoric. To this day, the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party clearly stipulates that party members must not participate in any form of religious activities or feudal superstitious activities.

However, the mausoleum in Fuping for the Xu family, the ancestral hall in Dengzhou, the cave dwelling in Liangjiahe, and the dragon veins of the Qinling Mountains—every one of these coordinates has the support of official funds, the endorsement of official documents, and the promotion of official media. When you place official rhetoric alongside actual behavior, a fundamental paradox emerges: a political party that explicitly forbids its members from believing in feng shui has a supreme leader who is using the state apparatus to execute a complete, large-scale family feng shui project. Faced with this paradox, there are two hypothetical explanations. The first is that Xi Jinping himself does not believe in it, and it is merely the sycophancy of local officials. This might explain the construction of his ancestral halls and mausoleums, but it cannot explain Xi Jinping's six directives regarding the Qinling Mountains! Therefore, the first explanation does not hold. The second explanation is that this is merely cultural tradition, not feudal superstition. For example, many people would say that ancestor worship and maintaining family genealogies are Chinese cultural traditions. If this explanation were only targeting the acts of maintaining genealogies and ancestor worship, it could be valid. However, the design of the aforementioned options involves technical feng shui operations. Where is the boundary between cultural tradition and superstition? When you are simply respecting your ancestors, it is called tradition, but when you design a mausoleum according to the precise technical specifications of feng shui, it is feudal superstition. Therefore, we can see that the second explanation also fails to exhaust the facts. The third explanation is that Xi Jinping himself deeply believes in feng shui. This is the only explanation that can account for all the facts simultaneously, because only if he believes in it would he have proactively confirmed his ancestral home in Dengzhou in 2004, said that Shaanxi is the soul of Yan'an when returning to Liangjiahe in 2015, issued six directives for the illegal structures in the Qinling Mountains, and accepted the expansion of his father's mausoleum to imperial specifications. Every single event only occurs naturally within the framework of his belief.

It is actually quite normal for Chinese people to believe in feng shui, as in 5,000 years of Chinese culture, the vast majority of people are influenced to some degree by feng shui thinking. For example, when choosing a house, one checks the orientation; when visiting graves, one chooses a time; and for moving, picking auspicious dates, weddings, and celebrations, don't people all choose dates? These are all part of the daily life of Chinese people. As someone born in China, raised in China, and deeply immersed in traditional Chinese culture, the fact that Xi Jinping believes in feng shui is not in itself strange. What is truly worth noting is not the belief itself, but the fact that while he believes, the party he leads explicitly forbids its members from believing in it in its party constitution, and the country he rules bases its ideological legitimacy in part on the eradication of superstition. As the supreme leader of this party and state, he actually has an obligation to provide a self-consistent explanation for this contradiction. This leads to the real core question: when the official ideology of a regime fundamentally conflicts with the actual beliefs of its supreme leader, what happens to that regime? The answer has already appeared in all the political actions of the Xi Jinping era. The official ideology is actually being hollowed out; Marxism-Leninism is increasingly like an empty shell—everyone talks about it, but no one believes in it, and everyone is serving something else.

In the 77 years since the CCP took power, it has gone through five generations of supreme leaders. Mao Zedong's legitimacy came from revolutionary war and class struggle; Deng Xiaoping's legitimacy came from economic development and reform and opening up; Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao's legitimacy came from collective leadership and institutional succession. But Xi Jinping's legitimacy is quietly retreating from Marxism-Leninism, retreating to Yaoshan, Lingshan, Qiankun Bay, and the Qinling Mountains—into this entire set of political myths from the era of traditional imperial rule. And when a political party needs to rely on feng shui to prove its legitimacy, what it is truly telling the world is something else: it no longer believes in its own original legitimacy. The rise of feng shui politics is not a sign of strength, but a confession of legitimacy anxiety. A truly confident regime does not need to bury its father in a mausoleum of imperial specifications, does not need to expand its ancestors' ancestral hall to the scale of a thousand mu, and does not need to construct the myth of the birthplace of Fuxi at the site of its rise to power. When all these become necessary, what is truly exposed is precisely the spiritual exhaustion of the rulers of an era. That is all for today.

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