Ren Jiantao, a professor of political science at Tsinghua University, one of China’s most elite institutions, has gone viral again with a lecture arguing that China’s imperial political system never truly ended. The video, uploaded to YouTube on Feb. 26, 2026, by commentator Cai Shenkun, runs over 33 minutes and has drawn massive attention, more than a decade after Ren first gained a national following for predicting with striking accuracy what Xi Jinping’s rule would look like.
The professor opened by revealing he has been punished for speaking out
Ren began the lecture with dark humor. Friends had urged him to keep speaking publicly, he said, and he fired back: “Why should I be the one who keeps talking? Have you prepared to bring me meals in prison? You can speak too, so why don’t you?” He then revealed that the Chinese Communist Party had stripped him of benefits he was previously entitled to. “Because of my speech, I’ve been punished,” Ren said. “They won’t give me anything anymore, not even the things the Party is obligated to give me.”
The admission is remarkable coming from a tenured professor at Tsinghua, an institution that sits at the pinnacle of China’s academic hierarchy and operates under close Party supervision. That Ren continues to speak at all, knowing the consequences, has made him something of a folk hero among China’s politically aware public.
Ren argued that China ended the imperial system but never killed the imperial mindset
The core of Ren’s lecture addressed why one-man rule keeps resurfacing in Chinese politics. The formal institutions of imperial rule were abolished over a century ago, Ren argued, but the underlying mentality, the expectation that a single supreme leader will solve all problems, remains deeply embedded in Chinese political culture.
“Chinese society has developed to this point, and you still expect some heroic figure to come along and save you from everything,” Ren said. “If you are this intellectually stunted, and you still claim your civilization is highly advanced, you are simply making yourself a laughingstock.”
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Ren traced this pattern to a failure of self-examination. Chinese people possess an admirable refusal to accept defeat, he said, but that quality curdles into self-deception when it means ignoring facts. When China fails to replicate what other nations have achieved, the response is not honest reflection but rhetorical bluster.
He called out China’s poverty and rejected the regime’s excuses
Ren introduced the concept of a “diligence revolution,” his term for China’s reliance on sheer labor rather than technological innovation. Without the ability to extend human effort through modern tools and systems, he argued, no amount of hard work can produce wealth. The result is visible in the numbers: 600 million Chinese people earn less than 1,000 yuan per month (roughly $140), and 900 million earn less than 2,000 yuan. “It’s miserable,” Ren said. “That wouldn’t even cover a month of boxed lunches in Beijing.”
Refusing to acknowledge this gap with the developed world amounts to intellectual dishonesty, Ren argued. Civilization has a hierarchy, he said bluntly, and Western civilization developed ahead of Chinese civilization in ways that carry demonstrable lessons. “But because our political discipline is so strict, we are always required to quote our Party leaders, and nobody else dares to push back.”
Ren told Chinese people to stop blaming the world for their problems
The lecture’s most striking passage was a direct challenge to the nationalist victimhood narrative that the CCP has cultivated for decades. China’s national destiny is determined by the choices of its own people, Ren said. When other nations facing equally difficult circumstances managed to modernize and China did not, the honest response is to ask why.
“Instead, to this day, we have never actually reflected on this question,” Ren said. “We just look for excuses: the Japanese are bad, the British are bad, the Americans are bad, the whole world is rotten to the core! Only we are good. And because we’re good people, we got unlucky. That makes no sense!”
The audience responded with visible enthusiasm. Online commenters praised Ren’s ability to make serious political science more engaging than stand-up comedy: “He lights himself on fire just to illuminate others.” Others called him “a real expert, not a hack.”
Ren’s track record of predicting Xi Jinping’s rule has given him enormous credibility
Ren first attracted widespread attention years ago through an earlier lecture, circulated widely online, in which he predicted that Xi Jinping’s generation of leaders would drain the life out of Chinese politics. “For officials like Xi Jinping, they will increasingly lack personal charisma,” Ren said in that earlier video. “We are about to enter a lifeless 20 years, because these two generations are Red Guards and Young Pioneers. The defining trait of Red Guards is that they have no rules. They think they can rebuild the authority of personal power, shouting empty political slogans at the top of their lungs.”
That prediction, made before Xi consolidated his grip on power, has aged with eerie precision. Xi abolished presidential term limits in 2018, packed the Politburo Standing Committee with loyalists at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, and has presided over an era of ideological tightening, economic stagnation, and diplomatic isolation that tracks closely with Ren’s forecast.
In another widely circulated clip from a December 2022 lecture, Ren told students: “Our Communist Party’s senior officials would rather believe Wang Lin,” a self-proclaimed qigong master who became famous in the 1990s, “than believe Marx. Even our top leader went to him for a fortune-telling session. Can a nation like this lead the world? In a country that is deeply addicted to conspiracy theories and lacks any collective spirit of rationality, what capacity do we have to lead the world?”
Some supporters fear Ren will face serious retaliation
While many online commenters celebrated Ren’s courage, others expressed worry. “Will Professor Ren face another crackdown?” one user wrote. “I have a feeling that if he keeps going like this, he’s going to be in big trouble,” wrote another.
Ren Jiantao, born in 1962 in Cangxi, Sichuan province, holds a tenured professorship at Tsinghua’s School of Social Sciences and is a doctoral supervisor. He is listed as a recipient of a special government stipend from China’s State Council. His research spans political philosophy, comparative Chinese and Western political thought, and Chinese political transformation and governance.
That a scholar with these credentials is willing to publicly dismantle the intellectual foundations of one-man rule, while acknowledging he has already been punished for doing so, speaks to the depth of frustration among China’s educated class. Whether the Party will tolerate his continued defiance, or make an example of him, is an open question.
By Li Muzi
