From Li Rui to Hu Jintao: Why the CCP under Xi Jinping is becoming increasingly silent
Many veteran comrades and high-ranking officials within the Party are not blind to Xi Jinping's trend of "establishing a single authority" and moving closer to the Mao era; their widespread choice of silence and reluctance to resist is due to various reasons. First is the deterrent effect brought by the high-pressure anti-corruption campaign. At the beginning of his term, Xi Jinping took down Zhou Yongkang, which was the first time since Deng Xiaoping that action was taken against a state-level high official; subsequently, he dealt with Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, two vice chairmen of the Military Commission, which greatly shocked the party, government, and military systems. At the same time, Wang Qishan led the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to conduct systematic investigations into the financial issues of current and retired high officials, leaving almost no one completely "clean." This control over the "money bags" essentially formed a universal constraint mechanism, causing the collective high-level leadership to fall silent, with no one daring to act rashly.
Secondly, a series of actions targeting potential political forces further reinforced the deterrent effect. For example, Liu Yuan's retirement from the military, Sun Zhengcai's investigation and prosecution, and Liu Yazhou's heavy sentence—almost none of these events triggered any public backlash. By the time of the 20th National Congress, Hu Jintao being escorted out of the venue on the spot was an even stronger symbolic scene—the high officials present fell collectively silent, forming a highly consistent political atmosphere. These superimposed signals amplified the sense of risk within the system to the extreme.
As for the grassroots level, the governance methods likewise demonstrate a high capacity for control. Taking Shanghai's prolonged lockdown as an example, such extreme management measures could suppress social mobility and collective action capacity in the short term, further reinforcing the impression of being "unchallengeable." In this environment, the difficulty of forming large-scale organized resistance at the social level has significantly increased.
From a deeper perspective, the reason why this power structure can exist stably is related to China's long-term political culture and social structure.
Historically, China has long been under a highly centralized system, and the concentration of power has deep institutional and cultural foundations. In modern times, society has not experienced a systematic intellectual enlightenment and institutional transformation similar to that of Europe, and changes at the level of values have been relatively limited. Against this background, a relatively stable interaction has formed between the concentration of power and social obedience.
Meanwhile, regarding the information environment, the internet could have originally been a tool to promote diverse cognition, but under realistic conditions, its openness is heavily restricted, and there is asymmetry in information acquisition. This leaves relatively limited space for the public to obtain comprehensive information, make independent judgments, and take collective action, resulting in a social whole that exhibits a certain degree of fragmentation and internal friction.
Regarding the succession issue, the logic is actually not complicated. Once power is highly concentrated and institutional constraints are weakened, the personal motivation to extend power will continuously strengthen. In the early stage of his term, Xi Jinping might still have been testing the waters, but with the completion of a series of political consolidations, his power base gradually solidified, and his policy choices changed accordingly—choosing to break term limits and promote long-term governance while the existing succession system still existed. Once this system is broken, restoring it will face extremely high costs.
More importantly, this long-term concentration of power will have a chain effect on the political ecology: to ensure power security, leaders tend to suppress potential competitors and promote highly dependent officials. Over time, the incentive mechanisms within the system will change, high-level cadres will tend toward conservatism and self-preservation, and overall vitality will decline. Even if the willingness to transfer power emerges in the future, it may face the realistic dilemma of "having no one to take over."
Reviewing the historical background of Deng Xiaoping promoting the succession system back then, one can find that its establishment had special conditions: the political reconstruction after the Cultural Revolution broke the existing factional structure, and at the same time, the older generation of leaders possessed sufficient prestige to both promote the establishment of the system and withdraw at the appropriate time. Such a historical window is extremely rare.
It was precisely against this background that the CCP once formed a relatively stable power transition mechanism. But once this mechanism is weakened or even destroyed, its reconstruction will no longer depend on the will of a single leader, but on more complex historical conditions. Without major institutional changes or external shocks, the difficulty of re-establishing a similar mechanism will be very high.
Overall, the current situation is both the result of realistic choices and related to long-term historical paths. Once institutional constraints are broken, the logic of power operation undergoes profound changes, and such changes often feature self-reinforcing characteristics.
Wuji Commentary:
Actually, it's not that no one within the CCP dared to criticize Xi Jinping. Didn't Li Rui dare to?
The problem is that when Li Rui said those things, he no longer cared about dying—he was about to die anyway. Many young people today might not even know who Li Rui was. He was not some "democracy activist" or "dissident," but a genuinely senior figure within the CCP. He had already entered the core of CCP power during the Mao era and later served as the Executive Deputy Director of the Organization Department of the CCP Central Committee. It could even be said that Li Rui himself bore responsibility for Xi Jinping being able to enter the core of power all the way. Precisely because of this, his public criticism of Xi Jinping in his later years appeared exceptionally glaring. In his later years, he repeatedly criticized Xi Jinping for moving back toward personal concentration of power and opposed returning to the Mao era. His video clip talking about Xi Jinping having "only an elementary school level" of education has now become a classic meme in the Chinese internet dissident circle. However, most people might just treat it as a sharp, direct criticism, while few realize that for Li Rui himself, it was more like a final confession before death—a belated confession of his own past errors in judgment. Because he watched with his own eyes as the system he had participated in establishing, maintaining, and even placing hope in, eventually walked back step by step to the Mao era. He had also already foreseen the suffering that Chinese people might endure in the future.
Hu Jintao's "being escorted out" at the 20th National Congress and Li Keqiang's "being deceased" can both be said to be symbolic of epochal nodes: from Li Rui to Hu Jintao and Li Keqiang, the last bit of space within the CCP where truth could still be spoken, different voices could still be retained, and superficial political decency could still be maintained, is also being escorted out of the venue and being deceased along with them.
Today's CCP is more terrifying than ever—terrifyingly silent.