A phrase reportedly circulating inside Zhongnanhai, the walled compound in central Beijing where China’s top leaders live and work, captures the mood inside the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling elite: “The air in Beijing is colder than it was in 1966.”
The reference is historically loaded and deliberate. In the early 1960s, Mao Zedong felt increasingly sidelined by the pragmatic bureaucracy that Liu Shaoqi, then China’s head of state, and Deng Xiaoping ran after Mao’s Great Leap Forward ended in mass famine and political humiliation. Mao complained repeatedly that Beijing had become a place where “you can’t stick a needle in or splash water on,” meaning the official apparatus had sealed him out entirely. He said the air in eastern China was “lively” compared to the “stifling” capital and wanted to use provincial pressure to break through. That frustration led directly to the Cultural Revolution, the decade-long campaign of political terror that destroyed the careers and lives of millions of Chinese officials and citizens.
An anonymous source described as a “red second generation” figure, meaning someone from a revolutionary-era CCP family with insider access to Party circles, said the atmosphere inside Zhongnanhai today is one of “extreme severity.” Mutual suspicion has replaced functioning governance. The remark reportedly leaked after a closed-door Party meeting and was used to describe how Xi, despite holding near-total formal authority, has ended up in a state of isolation that mirrors Mao’s predicament before 1966. Xi’s directives do not reliably travel past the compound walls.
Xi has spent years purging officials associated with the political networks of former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. The bureaucracy he left standing has responded with what amounts to a system-wide work stoppage. Cheng Xiaonong, a U.S.-based Chinese political economist who has written extensively on CCP elite politics, has characterized this as the largest “bureaucratic strike” in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Officials across the system have stopped competing for promotion. Their priority is to avoid drawing attention, avoid mistakes, and avoid becoming the next purge target. Xi’s response has been to double down with more campaign-style enforcement sweeps, more political purges, and more pressure. The cycle feeds on itself.
Xi’s crackdowns on the private tutoring industry, real estate developers, and major internet companies under the CCP banner of “common prosperity” have already been characterized by scholars as a “second Cultural Revolution.” The parallel to Mao extends beyond economic policy to the fundamental dynamics of power inside the Party: a leader who feels the system resisting him and responds with escalating political warfare.
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Xi suspects his own generals
The military dimension sharpens the Mao Zedong comparison. According to what is described as an internal report originating from the Central Military Commission, the Party body that controls all of China’s armed forces, Xi Jinping’s wholesale purge of the Rocket Force, China’s nuclear and strategic missile branch, and the Equipment Development Department was triggered by a specific discovery. Senior military officials had reportedly been holding private discussions about “contingency plans,” exploring how to distance themselves from Xi’s leadership under extreme scenarios.
The psychology matches Mao’s almost exactly. In 1966, Mao moved against Luo Ruiqing, then chief of the general staff, and He Long, a revolutionary-era marshal, on suspicion that they were positioning themselves for a military coup. Xi’s military purges have reportedly reached an intensity comparable to what China experienced during the early years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Rumors circulating within the system claim that some Chinese military figures privately communicated with Western counterparts, exploring the possibility of adopting a “neutral” stance in the event of an armed conflict over Taiwan. Whether these reports are fully accurate or partly inflated for political effect, they provoked a severe response from Xi and accelerated the CCP’s purge campaign across the military establishment.
Any heir becomes a target
The succession question is where the parallel between Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong runs deepest, and where the structural danger to the Chinese Communist Party regime is greatest.
Ming Juzheng, a Taiwan-based political analyst specializing in CCP elite politics and factional dynamics, has argued that the Party’s internal logic turns every designated successor into an immediate threat to the sitting leader. Mao’s own experience proved the point twice over. He first turned against Liu Shaoqi, who had been positioned as his successor. Liu was stripped of all Party and state positions and died under house arrest during the Cultural Revolution, denied medical treatment as his health deteriorated. Mao then turned against Lin Biao, the defense minister he had formally named as his heir. Lin died in 1971 when his plane crashed in Mongolia, allegedly while fleeing China after a failed coup attempt. Mao ultimately handed power to Hua Guofeng, a provincial official with no independent power base, who was promptly sidelined by Deng Xiaoping’s faction after Mao’s death.
Xi has followed this logic to its endpoint. By pushing through the abolition of presidential term limits in 2018 and refusing to name or groom a successor, Xi has created what analysts describe as a CCP succession vacuum. Ming has stated plainly that Xi dismantled the succession mechanism to prevent being overthrown while still in power. The unintended consequence is that every faction within the Chinese Communist Party, including factions within Xi’s own loyalist network, now operates in a state of extreme anxiety and quiet maneuvering. No one can see what the post-Xi era looks like, so everyone is either positioning for a power grab or scrambling for self-preservation. These are precisely the conditions under which palace coups become most likely.
Miles Yu (Yu Maochun), a former senior China policy adviser at the U.S. State Department under Secretary Mike Pompeo and currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, has framed Xi Jinping’s approach as a textbook example of Leninist party power monopoly pushed to a structural breaking point. Yu argues that Xi abolished the CCP’s succession system specifically to prevent power from leaking away during his lifetime. The result is a system Yu describes as “brittle.” If Xi experiences a serious health crisis, the regime will have no legitimate mechanism for transferring authority. The entire system will fracture.
Yu has described Xi’s predicament as a “classic dictator’s tragedy.” Xi has systematically closed off every path that could constrain him, and in doing so has left collapse as the only remaining trajectory. He eliminated the succession mechanism to ensure he could govern until death, replicating Mao’s model. But Mao governed a closed, agrarian society largely cut off from global markets. Xi governs a globally integrated economy that depends on predictable political transitions and institutional continuity. Foreign investors and China’s domestic business elites have drawn the obvious conclusion, and capital flight reflects it. Yu’s assessment is that this CCP succession vacuum is the root cause of China’s deepening economic and social instability.
A cultural revolution without the crowds
In 1966, Mao Zedong retreated to his compound at Dishuidong in Hunan province, plotting to unleash waves of Red Guard students to destroy the Party officials who had marginalized him. Today, Xi Jinping sits inside Zhongnanhai in Beijing, relying on big data surveillance systems, mass digital monitoring infrastructure, and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the CCP’s top internal body for investigating and punishing officials, to accomplish the same objective through bureaucratic and technological means.
Cheng Xiaonong has described Xi’s situation as a “Cultural Revolution without the masses.” He considers it more dangerous than Mao’s original. Mao, for all the destruction he unleashed, could mobilize genuine popular fervor. Millions of young Chinese believed in his cause, at least initially, and threw themselves into the campaign with ideological conviction. Xi Jinping cannot draw on anything comparable. The defining feature of his rule is suspicion: CCP officials suspect each other, Xi suspects his officials, and no one inside the leadership compound speaks honestly to China’s top leader.
Xi may not oppose the idea of naming a CCP successor in principle. The problem is structural and inescapable. At the apex of an authoritarian system with no institutional checks, any person designated as heir immediately becomes the flag around which every frustrated, frightened, or ambitious faction rallies. The heir becomes the alternative to Xi Jinping. And the moment an alternative exists, Xi becomes expendable.
So Xi watches the CCP bureaucracy atrophy. He governs in a political silence where compliance has replaced initiative and fear has replaced function. Many observers, inside China and internationally, now regard the eventual rupture of the Chinese Communist Party’s governing structure as a question of timing rather than probability.
