China's Intellectuals and Party Insiders Turned on Xi Jinping in 2020 - Vision Times
In the year COVID-19 exposed the CCP’s systemic failures, China’s most prominent dissidents, establishment intellectuals, and heirs of the Communist revolution mounted an unprecedented public campaign. . .
In the year COVID-19 exposed the CCP’s systemic failures, China’s most prominent dissidents, establishment intellectuals, and heirs of the Communist revolution mounted an unprecedented public campaign demanding that Xi Jinping, the CCP’s general secretary and China’s top leader, step down. The resistance was crushed. Its grievances have only deepened. The late autumn of 2019 brought the first signs of a respiratory outbreak in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in central China. What followed was a cover-up engineered by a system in which, to borrow the Party’s own maxim, “stability overrides everything. ”The Party’s political security apparatus suppressed evidence of human-to-human transmission. While New Year celebrations continued across China, eight Wuhan physicians who had tried to warn colleagues were summoned by police, forced to sign statements retracting their warnings, and publicly denounced on state television as rumor-mongers. Among them was Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist who would die of COVID-19 in February 2020 and become the face of the disaster’s avoidable toll. The bureaucratic machinery of flattery and concealment consumed the better part of a month that could have contained the outbreak. By the time Beijing acknowledged the scale of the crisis, the virus had spread across the country. Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer (not pictured) at the Great Hall of the People on Jan. 29, 2026 in Beijing, China. (Image: Vincent Thian-Pool via Getty Images)SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE NEWSLETTERFor the best of our weekly content！There is something wrong, please try again laterSuccessYou are now signed up for our newsletterSuccessCheck your email to complete sign upTwo professors denounced Xi Jinping by name on the same dayTwo men, both surnamed Xu and both trained in the law, published open denunciations of Xi Jinping within hours of each other. Xu Zhiyong, a legal scholar with a doctorate from Peking University and one of the founding figures of the New Citizens Movement, a loose coalition of activists who had campaigned for constitutional rights and official transparency through civil litigation and public action,published an essaycalling on Xi to resign. At the time, Xu was in hiding in southern China, having fled a wave of arrests targeting participants in a citizens’ gathering in Xiamen the previous December. He charged Xi with accumulating personal control over too many Party committees and policy-making bodies, producing a system so centralized that senior officials could function only as note-takers rather than decision-makers. He attacked the flagship infrastructure project known as the Belt and Road Initiative and the construction of Xiong’an, a planned city conceived as Xi’s legacy project, as vanity programs disconnected from the country’s real needs. He accused Xi of crippling private enterprise through ideological interference and of allowing political loyalty calculations to dictate the regime’s response to the outbreak in its critical early days. The essay closed with a personal appeal: for the sake of 1. 3 billion people, step aside, and give China a path toward peaceful reform. The second essay appeared the same day. Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University, China’s most prestigious engineering and science institution, published a lengthy manifesto under the title “Angry People Are No Longer Afraid. “He documented what he described as the complete moral collapse of the Party’s governing claim: the digital surveillance apparatus deployed to monitor and silence citizens; WeChat-based social control that had turned ordinary communication into a political minefield; the layers of local officials who had suppressed outbreak data to avoid displeasing their superiors, reverting the country, in his words, to the arbitrary brutality of the Cultural Revolution. He addressed himself to the Chinese public directly. “We, We the People,” he wrote, “how can we let ourselves continue to ‘survive no better than swine; fawn upon the power-holders like curs; and live in vile filth like maggots’?” The question circulated across Chinese social media until censors deleted it, then circulated again. A retired Party insider graded the pandemic response zeroOn Feb. 23 and March 2, 2020, Zhao Shilin, a retired professor from the Central University for Nationalities and a former member of the central committee of the China National Democratic Construction Association, one of eight minor political parties permitted to exist under Party supervision as window dressing, published two open letters addressed to the CCP leadership. He signed them with his real name, sent them through official channels, and rendered his verdict on the regime’s pandemic response with no diplomatic softening: on the first report card, the only possible grade was zero. Every piece of public information, including medical data, was filtered through the question of whether its release might destabilize the political order, so accurate early warnings about the outbreak were treated as threats to social harmony and suppressed. Officials at every level had learned that careers advanced by delivering good news and were destroyed by delivering bad news; by the time accurate information about the outbreak’s severity reached the Politburo, Xi’s top decision-making body, it had been sanitized beyond recognition. Local officials had no authority to act independently, deploy emergency resources, or publish public health alerts without explicit authorization from above, and waiting for permission from a political system that moved by consensus and caution, they lost more than two weeks. The Party had spent the previous decade dismantling independent charitable foundations, grassroots advocacy networks, and volunteer organizations, so when the crisis arrived nothing remained to fill the gap; the only permitted relief organizations were Party-controlled entities such as the Red Cross Society of China, which became synonymous during the lockdown with dysfunction and allegations of diverted donated supplies. The silencing of Li Wenliang was the logical product of a censorship system designed to protect the regime from embarrassing truths, including the truth that people were dying of a preventable epidemic. In his second letter, Zhao singled out the Party’s propaganda apparatus for particular contempt. While Wuhan’s crematoriums ran around the clock and families were separated from dying relatives, the Central Propaganda Department commissioned and published a book titled “A Great Nation’s Battle Against the Epidemic,” celebrating the regime’s handling of a crisis it had manufactured. Zhao called it a violation of the most basic norms of human civilization. Both letters were removed from every Chinese internet platform within hours of publication, and Zhao was subsequently placed under a surveillance order restricting his movements and communications. Ren Zhiqiang, president of Huayuan Group, delivers a speech during the 2006 High-End Economic Forum at Luxehills International Club on Jan. 7, 2006 in Chengdu of Sichuan Province, China. (Image: China Photos/Getty Images)A developer with ties to China’s ruling families publicly called Xi a failureIn early March 2020, an essay titled “The Clown Who Strips Naked to Cling to the Imperial Throne” began circulating among senior Party officials and their families. Its author was Ren Zhiqiang, former chairman of Huayuan Group, a state-backed property developer in Beijing, and a member of the group commonly known as the “princelings”: sons and daughters of the founding generation of CCP leaders. Ren had long been known for blunt public commentary on Party policy, and he had personal relationships spanning decades with figures including Wang Qishan, at the time China’s vice president. On Feb. 23, Xi had presided over a nationally televised video conference before an audience of 170,000 officials assembled at screens across the country. The regime had staged the event as a display of commanding competence. After studying the speech, Ren wrote that he “saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown stripped naked who insisted on continuing being emperor. ” The spectacle, he argued, was an attempt to use amplified self-congratulation to drown out the sounds of a disaster the leadership had caused. Ren disappeared from public view in March 2020, was stripped of his Party membership, placed under investigation, and convicted by a Party-controlled court on charges of corruption, bribery, and misuse of state assets. He was sentenced to 18 years, a term amounting to the rest of his functional life. His son was detained as additional leverage. The message was calibrated for the audience that mattered: other princelings watching from inside the system. Later that month, Chen Ping, chairman of the Hong Kong-based television network Sunshine TV and himself from a senior Party family, publicly forwarded an anonymous petition calling for a special enlarged session of the Politburo to review Xi’s performance across a range of failures: the diplomatic isolation produced by his foreign policy, economic stagnation, the setbacks in Hong Kong and relations with Taiwan, and pandemic mismanagement. Chen later said he forwarded the petition not as a conspirator but as a barometer. It reflected, he said, what the country’s senior officials, major technology executives, and private sector leaders were thinking but could not say aloud: the regime was moving in a direction that alarmed nearly everyone with standing to notice. Since 2020, China’s economy has deteriorated, the property sector has collapsed in waves, and youth unemployment reached levels the government eventually stopped publishing. Xu Zhiyong is serving 14 years. Ren Zhiqiang is serving 18. Dissent has found fewer and fewer legal outlets since.