Cui Yongyuan served two terms on the CCP’s political advisory body and won over a hundred official awards before the Party erased him from public life. His reappearance during the 2026 Two Sessions, after years of banned social media accounts and enforced invisibility, has prompted overseas observers to ask whether control of China’s censorship apparatus is shifting hands.
On March 7, a video uploaded to the social media platform X by the account “News Investigation” showed Cui delivering a pointed attack on the CCP’s censorship regime.
“I was a member of the 11th and 12th National Committee of the CPPCC,” Cui said, referring to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a rubber-stamp advisory body the Party uses to give a veneer of political participation to selected public figures. “I have received countless awards, more than a hundred. I am also a non-party patriotic figure,” he continued, using a CCP designation for prominent individuals who are not Party members but are considered politically reliable. “If you silence someone like me, it is this society that is losing face. It is your government that is losing face.”
“I’m fine. If you ban me, then ban me. What can you do? It is you who are embarrassed. If one day you are asked to explain this, how will you explain it? You silence whoever you want to silence. You prevent whoever you want from speaking. Whoever says something you don’t like, you just remove them.”
The video resonated widely. One commenter wrote: “Do the Communist bandits even fear losing face? They have no face to lose. No matter how you criticize them, everything is deleted instantly both inside and outside the Great Firewall. As long as most people inside the wall remain successfully brainwashed, the system will continue.” Another user, writing under the name “Mybrooks,” offered a bleaker assessment: “The CPPCC is nothing more than a chess piece. In this system, only the very top person is safe. Everyone below is unsafe. Those who refuse to play the role of a chess piece can only be erased.”
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From CCTV star to censorship target
Western readers are unlikely to recognize Cui’s name, but in China he was once a household figure. He became famous in 1996 as the host of Tell It Like It Is, a CCTV program that was unusual for its relatively candid format. For years he operated within the system, serving two terms on the CPPCC and collecting official awards.
His relationship with the regime began to deteriorate as he grew more outspoken. In a July 2023 video, Cui described China’s system as thoroughly rotten: “It’s already rotten to the core. Completely rotten. Let’s just enjoy this rot together.” He singled out the CCP’s official news agency Xinhua for fabricating stories about poverty in the United Kingdom and other developed countries. “Xinhua is talking nonsense, but no one dares to say so. If you say it, they just ban you online. They talk nonsense all day.”
In April 2024, Cui attacked China’s journalism education system directly. “Is what we call the broadcasting and television news major really mass communication? Let me tell you clearly: it is not. What do we actually study? We study propaganda.” He drew a sharp distinction: mass communication tells the audience the real situation and analyzes it, while propaganda invents something out of nothing and makes people believe it, at any cost, including outright lies.
By this point, Cui had been largely erased from China’s internet. His social media accounts were banned. His public presence was eliminated.
The court scandal that made Cui a liability
Cui’s troubles deepened in 2018 when he publicly accused China’s Supreme People’s Court, the highest court in the CCP’s Party-controlled judiciary, of losing critical case files. He posted repeatedly on the social media platform Weibo claiming that documents related to a billion-yuan mining rights dispute in Shaanxi province had been stolen from a court office.
The judge who handled the case, Wang Linqing, had discovered in November 2016 that both the primary and supplementary files for the second-instance trial had vanished. After reviewing surveillance footage and finding it had gone blank, the court chose not to report the theft to police and instead instructed the judge to reconstruct the missing files from memory. The Supreme People’s Court eventually confirmed that Cui’s claims were accurate.
U.S.-based commentator Jiang Feng, who hosts a political analysis channel, has argued that the CCP’s internal factions deliberately used Cui to expose the Shaanxi case as part of a power struggle targeting the then-president of the Supreme People’s Court, Zhou Qiang, and the head of the CCP’s top anti-corruption body, Zhao Leji, who at the time led the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Once the factional objective was achieved, Cui was discarded. The judge who helped expose the case, Wang Linqing, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Cui himself was banned from public life.
Jiang also cited overseas reports claiming Cui narrowly survived a poisoning attempt in August 2020, with suspicion pointing toward Ding Xuexiang, who runs the CCP’s national security coordination office and is currently the director of the Office of the Central National Security Commission.
Cui’s return raises questions about who controls China’s censors
After years of enforced silence, Cui resurfaced publicly in January 2026 at the Beijing premiere of a film called Cuihu. He attended the event and delivered remarks without any visible interference from authorities.
The film’s title itself became a subject of online speculation. The Chinese character “翠” (cui, as in the film’s name) can be broken into two component radicals: “羽” (meaning “feather”) and “卒” (meaning “death” or “a foot soldier who dies”). The traditional form of Xi Jinping’s surname, “習,” contains the same “羽” radical. Chinese internet users, skilled at constructing political messages through wordplay that evades automated censorship, read the combination as an oblique reference to Xi’s death. The fact that this interpretation circulated without being scrubbed added to the sense that something had shifted.
Cui’s Douyin account, which had been banned for years, has reportedly been partially restored. His videos are receiving hundreds of thousands of likes and tens of millions of views.
Jiang Feng posed the question directly: if someone who allegedly survived an assassination attempt ordered by the current leadership’s security apparatus is now appearing publicly, supporting a politically charged film, and posting freely on a platform the CCP tightly controls, what does that say about who is actually running China’s censorship system? He suggested that control over the internet authorities may have shifted away from Xi’s inner circle.
Jiang also noted that Xi removed many officials in Shaanxi province but apparently could not or did not protect Cui, which he interpreted as evidence that Cui was never aligned with Xi’s faction. Some overseas observers, Jiang said, believe Cui may be a figure left behind by the political network associated with former CCP general secretary Hu Jintao and former prime minister Wen Jiabao.
The Falun Gong connection in Cui’s early career
There is one further layer to Cui’s story that overseas Chinese readers are aware of but Western audiences may not be. Early in his career, Cui’s program Tell It Like It Is cooperated with CCTV in producing content critical of Falun Gong, the spiritual practice that the CCP launched a nationwide persecution campaign against in 1999.
The program was supervised at the time by Chen Meng, the deputy director of CCTV’s News Commentary Department. In 2001, Chen helped produce the so-called “Tiananmen self-immolation” broadcast, an incident that the CCP used as a centerpiece of its propaganda campaign against Falun Gong. On August 14, 2001, the International Education Development organization issued a statement at a United Nations meeting describing the incident as a staged event orchestrated by Chinese authorities and condemning it as an act of state terrorism. Over the past two decades, independent analysts have raised extensive questions about the broadcast’s authenticity. Chen Meng later died of cancer.
Cui himself later suffered severe depression and left CCTV. His trajectory from state media insider to outspoken critic to banned figure to sudden resurgence remains difficult to read cleanly. Whether he is acting on principle, serving as a factional instrument, or some combination of both, his visibility during the 2026 Two Sessions is one more sign that the internal politics of the CCP are less stable than the regime wants the world to believe.
By Li Muzi
