48 Hours at Xijiao Guest House! Xi Jinping Submits His Report in Shanghai, CCP Elders Completely Lose Faith! [Jiang Feng Horizon 20260717 Episode 438]

Xi Jinping arrived at the Xijiao Hotel in Shanghai 48 hours ahead of schedule to submit his political report card for his thirteen years in power to the CCP elders. The article details his failures in real estate, chips, and new energy vehicles, views his focus on artificial intelligence as a fourth gamble, analyzes the context of his meeting with the President of Kazakhstan, and points out that the elders have completely lost faith in him and are demanding his resignation.

Video link:

Full text:

Welcome back to Jiang Feng Vision, friends. From July 15 to 16, 2026, a silent, high-stakes examination worthy of being recorded in the history of the CCP was taking place at the Xijiao Hotel in Shanghai. Xi Jinping, the leader of a major power, landed in Shanghai in a panic, a full 48 hours earlier than expected—an unprecedented move. He came to the Xijiao Hotel to submit his political report card for his past thirteen years of governance to the CCP elders residing there. To cover up this defense of his tenure, which would determine his political survival, state media staged an extremely absurd farce over those 48 hours. On the first day, he specifically visited a dilapidated residential area; on the second day, at the Xijiao Hotel, he dragged Kazakh President Tokayev along, rambling incessantly about why the Chinese Communist Party is capable. A leader who controls the nuclear button spends one day looking at toilets and the next reciting party lessons—this was a political survival show performed for the CCP elders in the neighboring villas. He wanted to use the grand promises of AI and "new quality productive forces" to tell these old timers that his path has not failed and that he still has cards to play. But this time, the elders do not intend to give him a passing grade. Even Zhu Rongji, who most believed in the CCP's ability to concentrate resources to accomplish great things, had completely lost faith in him a year ago. He knows better than anyone that a driver who has crashed three luxury cars—real estate, chips, and new energy vehicles—is now holding a new key called AI, simply wanting to continue occupying the driver's seat and drag China into an abyss of no return. If even Zhu Rongji no longer believes him, who else can Xi Jinping's riddled report card possibly deceive?

Since it's about coming to the Xijiao Guesthouse to hand in the answer sheet, where on earth did Xi Jinping get the answer sheet in his hands? Just think about it: the real estate sector has imploded, trillions spent on chips have gone down the drain, and his personal report card is covered in red crosses. To face the conservatives with these defiled papers would be no different from suicide in the eyes of those shrewd and cold individuals. Therefore, before the exam began, an extremely absurd official robbery took place inside the Xijiao Guesthouse. Xi Jinping brazenly snatched away the answer sheet belonging to his own Premier, Li Qiang. This is why he had not shown his face there for eight years, yet this year he insisted on coming to Shanghai in person to seize the guest of honor seat at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference. The World Artificial Intelligence Conference had been held for eight sessions, and Beijing's rules had originally been ironclad. At the inaugural conference, Li Qiang read a letter in his capacity as the Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee. Throughout the four years of the pandemic that followed, Li Qiang served unshakably as the grand supervisor in Shanghai. Even later, when Li Qiang moved to Beijing to become premier and the conference was upgraded in status, the person stepping forward to speak remained Li Qiang. But by 2026, seeing that the party elders were about to audit the accounts, Xi Jinping panicked. Before the opening ceremony, he firmly planted himself in the guest of honor seat that Li Qiang had guarded for eight years, and insisted on delivering the keynote speech himself, registering all the Chinese solutions for global artificial intelligence under his own name alone. This was clearly cheating in the exam room; he was forcibly renaming the child that Li Qiang had painstakingly raised to carry the surname Xi. What's even more interesting is that in Chengdu in the Great Southwest, an APEC Digital Week of even higher specifications, with participation from 21 countries and regions, was being held at the exact same time. There were digital ministerial meetings, telecommunications working groups, and genuine multilateral economic and trade negotiations. If it were truly for China's science, technology, and industry, it would obviously be much more reasonable for Xi Jinping, as head of state, to go to Chengdu, which boasted more sound multilateral mechanisms and higher-level foreign guests. Yet why on earth did he abandon Chengdu and stubbornly hole up in Shanghai's Xijiao Guesthouse? Because Chengdu was discussing serious international economics and trade, where there were only cold industry data points and no political theater. More importantly, Chengdu didn't have that bunch of political elders watching him with cold eyes. Only in Shanghai, deep within the leafy shade of the Xijiao Guesthouse, with the conservative elders in the neighboring villas quietly watching from the dark, could he wave the snatched pie of artificial intelligence over the wall, pass it off as his own new productive forces, and make his final struggle in front of the elders in Shanghai. But little did he expect that the examiners of the Senate had long since grown utterly disgusted with his robbery and cheating.

Speaking of this, some friends might ask: on what grounds are the elders sitting in Shanghai? According to the old rules for CCP elders reviewing papers, shouldn't it be Beidaihe? That's a great question. Every year at the end of July and early August, the retired old men sit in a row by the sea in Beidaihe, and the incumbent leaders go over to report one by one. This is an old rule passed down for decades. But this year the exam venue was moved up. What kind of place is the Xijiao Guesthouse? It is Shanghai's highest-spec state guesthouse, a sprawling expanse of gardens on Hongqiao Road with independent villas hidden deep in the tree shadows. Back in the day when Mao Zedong went south to Shanghai, this was where he regularly stayed; people outside the walls couldn't even count how many lights were turned on inside at night. When the elders wanted to audit Xi Jinping's ledger, they didn't have to wait for the August sea breeze; a July session at the Xijiao Guesthouse behind closed doors served just as well as an exam room. Just savor this time gap: before the opening day of the conference even arrived, he touched down on July 15, a full 48 hours early. A leader who usually made dignitaries from around the world wait for him alone was this time squatting at the exam room door two days early, like an examinee terrified of being late. When does a student arrive at the exam room two days early? There is only one situation: when they are utterly lacking in confidence and scared to death.

Having obtained the stolen AI test paper, Xi Jinping turned and walked into the reception hall of the Xijiao State Guest Hotel, because the multinational special actors he had hired were already sitting opposite him on schedule. On the afternoon of July 16, 2026, President Tokayev of Kazakhstan, as the highest-ranking foreign guest at this conference, officially appeared. The official media's press release on this meeting was written in high-sounding terms, but if you peel back those diplomatic platitudes, you will find the atmosphere at the scene was absurd. Tokayev's trip was for the real money in China's treasury, for railways, highways, energy ports, and the urgently needed digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence technology. Yet, sitting opposite him, Xi Jinping began to speak with a serious expression, lecturing the president of a Central Asian country at length about why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is capable, about why history and the people chose him, and why his own path of governance is absolutely correct. Did Tokayev fly all the way to Shanghai just to sit in the Xijiao State Guest Hotel and listen to a lecture on the 105th anniversary of the founding of the CCP? Did he need to write a study report? Did he care? Of course, he did not care. This untimely political party lecture was not meant for Tokayev at all; it was meant for the CCP elders in the neighboring villa who were scrutinizing his governing performance. 'Look, my theory still has vitality on the international stage; even a foreign president has to sit in front of me and listen obediently. You cannot replace me now.' And Tokayev, as one of the most clear-headed and realistic political veterans on the international stage, cooperated extremely well by delivering the standard answer that Xi Jinping wanted most. Official media reported that Tokayev stated on the spot that he congratulated China on the world-renowned achievements made under the wise leadership of President Xi Jinping. Please savor these four words: 'wise leadership.' For the sake of these four words, the Kazakh side calculated the advance payment down to the second. Just the day before Tokayev met with Xi Jinping, on July 15, an overseas promotion conference for the fifth volume of 'Xi Jinping: The Governance of China' was grandly held in Astana. This was the tacit multinational political understanding in the Xijiao State Guest Hotel. Kazakhstan held an overseas promotion for the new book to set the stage for the leader's theory, and Xi Jinping gave Tokayev a lecture in the Xijiao State Guest Hotel on why the Communist Party is capable, personally setting the theme. Tokayev, with extreme tacit understanding, offered the four words 'wise leadership.' Official media accurately recorded this sentence and sent it to the headlines of that evening's CCTV News as a 'get-out-of-jail-free card' to repel the elders' questioning. But is Tokayev really a fool who can be fooled by a few party lectures? During the 2022 Kazakhstan riots, he was able to invite the wolf into the house, asking Putin's special forces to enter the city to stabilize the situation, while simultaneously issuing orders to shoot and kill without warning. Once the crisis passed, he turned around and uprooted the 'emperor emeritus' Nazarbayev, who had ruled Kazakhstan for thirty years. Such a ruthless political figure who rose to power by leveraging others and could turn around and eradicate his mentor would certainly know how much the four words 'wise leadership' were worth in Beijing at this moment. By just moving his lips, listening to a boring political party lecture, and delivering a compliment that Beijing needed most, he could immediately exchange it for China's preferential loans, infrastructure projects, and artificial intelligence technology transfers. Why wouldn't he do this business? Xi Jinping has been reduced to needing a sentence of 'wise leadership' from the President of Kazakhstan to prove to the elders next door that his path has not completely gone bankrupt, but he never expected that the examiners in the Senate had long since seen through this multinational double act bought with real money. If you think one layer deeper, the price of this compliment is itself a verdict. Ten years ago, foreign dignitaries flew to Beijing and queued up to seek an audience. When the money from the Belt and Road was being scattered, it was Xi Jinping who picked and chose who to give it to. In those years, 'wise leadership' didn't cost money; leaders of various countries scrambled to offer it. But by the time of the 2026 Xijiao State Guest Hotel, the same four words had to be exchanged for preferential loans, infrastructure projects, and artificial intelligence technology transfers, one by one, with real money. Even Kazakhstan understood that this leader was desperate and short of goods; the compliments he wanted could now be priced at will. The elders in the neighboring villas have been doing this their whole lives; could they not see it clearly? A leader who has to rely on spending money to buy praise—how far has his market value fallen? The price tag of these four words is the most accurate market ticker.

In that unlit conference room at the Xijiao Guest House, the final verdict of the party elders was not about how to develop artificial intelligence, nor about how to promote new productive forces, but the cold reality that Xi Jinping must step down. These veteran cadres of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who have lived long enough to become political masterminds, do not need to understand AI; they only need to understand Xi Jinping. He has been in power for 13 years—long enough for the party elders to see through a person's capability, and long enough for the nation's enterprises and local finances to be completely destroyed by his personal directives. Especially within the CCP, even Zhu Rongji completely lost confidence in him a year ago. It must be noted that Zhu Rongji is no Western-style market liberal; he comes from the planning system and engineered the tax-sharing reform. He believed in concentrating resources to accomplish great things more than anyone else, yet even he—who has been retired for over 20 years, kept his mouth shut tighter than a safe, and never publicly commented on current leaders—shook his head completely a year ago. Just weigh how heavy that lack of trust is. And what has Xi Jinping turned the national plan into over these 13 years? The elders opened the three bloody ledgers in his hands, only to see a series of extremely low-intelligence chain collisions. The first vehicle is the real estate market: complaining that the speed was too fast, he hastily introduced the harsh “three red lines,” slamming on the brakes hard while going 120 kilometers per hour. He provided no new tax sources for local governments, left no retreat for developers, and cared nothing about the asset security of thousands of households. The result? Developers collapsed in batches, local government finances ran out of funds, and tens of millions of ordinary citizens carrying 30-year mortgages watched unfinished properties in the wind and rain that could never be handed over, even sparking a nationwide mortgage boycott wave. This quite clearly blew up the nation's wealth foundation. The second vehicle is chips: at his command, a massive state-led chip manufacturing frenzy began. Cement sellers, real estate developers, and even pig farmers overnight renamed their companies as semiconductor experts to scam government subsidies. The Wuhan Hongxin project alone embezzled 12.0 billion yuan, and before the factory buildings were even finished, the sole unopened ASML lithography machine was mortgaged to the bank. Trillions were poured in, leaving behind only scam artists, unfinished factory buildings, and massive non-performing loans for state-owned banks. The third vehicle is new energy vehicles: once labeled as a leader's project, local governments frantically built factories to scramble for output. When cars couldn't be sold, prices were cut, engaging in a price war of mutual bleeding; when price cuts still failed to sell them, shell companies were registered to buy their own cars to extract state subsidies, ultimately leaving tens of thousands of brand-new new energy vehicles abandoned in the wilderness to form spectacular EV graveyards. No one dared to halt production, because stopping production meant admitting that the direction guided by the General Secretary was wrong. With three rotten ledgers laid out on the table, in the eyes of the elders, today's artificial intelligence is merely the fourth vehicle Xi Jinping is preparing to crash. More absurdly, the technological soil for artificial intelligence is the free flow of information, data authenticity, and the boundless collision of ideas, yet in Xi Jinping's China, what does AI face? Before any large language model (LLM) can be launched, the first step is not testing its algorithms, but going to the Cyberspace Administration of China for ideological censorship. The LLM must first enter people's brains, hearts, and souls, and must first study Xi Jinping Thought. In July 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China jointly issued the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services, requiring LLMs to register and undergo evaluation before launch, ensuring every generated sentence reflects core socialist values. Just try domestic LLMs yourself and you will know: ask about the weather and it answers fluently; ask why housing prices keep falling and it starts playing tai chi; push the question a step deeper and it immediately swallows its words, politely replying, “Let's change the topic.” An AI that cannot mention June Fourth, cannot mention economic collapse, and where even Winnie the Pooh cannot be inputted, how could it possibly possess normal thinking and associative capabilities? An AI that cannot even speak the truth, how could it possibly compete with the free world's OpenAI? When human brains are silenced, how can computers possibly be smart? This is the common death law of all leader-sponsored projects under the Xi Jinping regime: bad news is suppressed while false figures are reported upward, money continues to be pumped into failing projects, people who actually do technology and products get no resources, while scammers who are best at chanting slogans, giving reports, and taking photos with leaders stand at the forefront. Finally, the industry is dragged into price wars, debt, and overcapacity, while Xi Jinping himself remains forever correct—success means he personally directed it, and failure means Western suppression and lower-level execution deviations.

Friends, as we turn this page of the ledger, let's pause and look at the people crushed beneath the cars. Who was sitting inside those three wrecked vehicles? They were a young couple in Zhengzhou who paid a down payment, paid their mortgage month after month, and finally had to pitch a tent on the construction site of an unfinished building; they were construction workers holding up banners outside the Wuhan Hongxin plant, demanding their hard-earned money; they were college students who studied computer science for four years, only to graduate right as the industry collapsed, sending out 300 resumes without a single response. When youth unemployment rates kept rising to a point where even the officials themselves couldn't bear to look, what did they do? Instead of trying to solve unemployment, they first stopped publishing the figures. Once the fuss died down, they changed the algorithm and started publishing them again. People were still unemployed, but the unemployment numbers were cured first. Now pay attention to another thing: after these three car crashes, did a single minister resign to take responsibility? Did a single provincial Party secretary face accountability and step down? Not one. The ones who slammed on the brakes still get promoted, the ones who signed off and scattered money still sit on the podium, and the ones who fabricated the numbers still read reports on stage. In a normal country, with real estate collapsing like this, the Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development's resignation letter would already be on the desk, the parliament would hold hearings, and voters would cast their ballots to kick the ruling party out of power. But under the system of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ordinary people don't even have the right to kick out a county magistrate. That is why it fell to a few elderly figures in their eighties and nineties at the Xijiao Guest House to do what should have been done by 1.4 billion people voting. The elders have seen through it completely: it is not that China cannot develop artificial intelligence, but that artificial intelligence must absolutely never be left to Xi Jinping to mess up anymore. By this point, the focus of intra-party struggle is long no longer about changing policies or replacing which premier. Li Keqiang and Wang Yang both managed the economy under him, and in the end, they were either marginalized or driven out of the center of power. As long as Xi Jinping remains in that highest position, as long as he can make arbitrary decisions and flip the table at any moment, no one who becomes premier can save China's economy. The only way out is to replace this mad driver. Xi Jinping must step down. As long as he remains in the highest position, the market will not believe that policies can be stable, businesses will not dare to invest, and officials will only continue to borrow, demonstrate loyalty, and fabricate numbers. The lights at the Xijiao Guest House are still on, and the defense continues, but the judges in the audience have long since written down their scores in the dark. Friends, regardless of whether the results of this defense are eventually posted, one ledger can be settled right now: if Xi Jinping loses, the sky won't fall. But if he wins? If he wins, the key named AI remains clenched in his hands, and the entire China will be tied to a fourth vehicle, accompanying a driver who has already wrecked three cars as he charges toward the cliff one more time. Real estate crashed, and what was lost was the housing that ordinary people saved over two generations; chips crashed, and what was lost was trillions of silver from the state treasury; new energy crashed, and what was lost was an entire industry. If the fourth car crashes too, what will be lost is China's final ticket to catch up with this round of the technological revolution. The lights of the Xijiao Guest House will eventually go out. Once the lights go out, where China goes depends entirely on those scores written in the dark. Alright, that's all for this episode.

See you in the next episode, friends.