Despite using his anti-corruption campaign and political purges to consolidate power after taking office in 2012, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping continues to face resistance from a “vast technocratic bureaucracy,” according to claims made in an article circulating online that is allegedly authored by a staff member of the Party’s General Office.
The article, which appeared in early February, is titled “The Inevitable Failure of Xi Jinping” (《习注定失败的真相》) and argues that the “technocratic bureaucracy” was shaped over 40 years from the start of economic and social reforms begun in 1978. Its officials are distributed across key positions in the economic and political-legal sectors in both the central and regional authorities, making them an “indispensable backbone of national governance.”
According to “The Inevitable Failure,” these “technocrats” have reached a broad consensus that Xi’s one-man rule has brought the Communist Party to the brink of ruin and that the regime can only be rescued through his removal.
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While Xi has established his firm control over all leadership positions and Communist China’s military, the many dissenters in the “vast technocratic bureaucracy” use grassroots means to undermine Xi’s leadership, such as by sabotaging the implementation of his policies, manipulating data to exacerbate China’s financial crises, and introducing contradictions in the Party’s messaging to create ideological “dilemmas.” Though Xi appears to wield absolute power, he is in fact cut off from channels that would allow him to understand the true situation in China. The article believes the “technocrats” will ultimately drive Xi to “complete failure.”
Dissident movement or political struggle?
In a Feb. 10 newsletter entry, political risk consultancy SinoInsider argues that while the publication of “The Inevitable Failure” speaks to the broad dissent against Xi in the CCP establishment, with the author or authors possibly representing rank-and-file officials, or a “Party faction rivaling the Xi camp” — it does not appear to advocate genuine reforms in China.
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While clamoring for Xi’s removal, the article offers no criticism of the Communist Party system, its totalitarian ideology, or human rights abuses.
The article “reveals its bias by only holding Xi accountable for the CCP regime’s crises while ignoring the problems developed over the decades through bureaucratic malpractice and corruption,” SinoInsider wrote, noting that much of the corruption and political abuses rife throughout China were and continue to be the work of the “vast technocratic bureaucracy” praised in “The Inevitable Failure.”
“The Inevitable Failure of Xi Jinping” reads similarly in tone to a lengthy Chinese-language tract published in an overseas pro-CCP website in 2022.
The more than 40,000-word “Objective Appraisal of Xi Jinping” (客观评价习近平) issued similar criticisms of his strongman rule, while ignoring Communist China’s human rights abuses. SinoInsider notes that the “Objective Appraisal” further praised previous CCP leaders Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, both of whom oversaw bloody crackdowns such as that of the 1989 Chinese democracy movement and the persecution of Falun Gong starting in 1999.
