On July 13, 2026, a court in the northern Chinese city of Datong sentenced Zhou Derui, formerly a member of Tianjin’s Party leadership and head of the organization department that controls the metropolis’s official appointments, to 14 years in prison for bribery and fined him 4 million yuan, according to the Party’s news agency, Xinhua. The verdict closed a case that had drawn attention far beyond the corruption charge, because the Party’s disciplinary indictment of Zhou carried a rarely used political accusation, “improperly discussing the central leadership,” and the discussions in question, according to leaked case details, were jokes at Xi Jinping’s expense.
The court’s announcement said that from 2000 to 2025, Zhou used a string of posts, at Hunan province’s land and resources department, as mayor and then Party secretary of the city of Changde, and finally as Tianjin’s organization chief, to enrich others in their business dealings, collecting more than 43 million yuan in cash and property directly or through intermediaries.
Zhou owed his final rise to Li Hongzhong, now a vice chairman of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature. During Li’s years running Tianjin, Zhou reportedly jumped three grades in two years and ended up holding the city’s power over cadre appointments, in effect serving as Li’s personnel steward. The Party announced Zhou’s fall on March 13, 2025. When it expelled him that Sept. 4, the disciplinary notice recited the usual sins, a “distorted view of political achievement” and trades of power for money and sex, then added the unusual one: Zhou had “improperly discussed the central leadership.”
Leaked case details show the ‘improper discussion’ was satire of Xi’s slogans
On March 23, 2026, Cai Xia, a retired professor of the Central Party School, the institution that trains the Party’s senior officials, circulated details of the political charge from a Chinese legal-affairs account on the WeChat platform. According to case handlers, Zhou’s offense came down to three episodes of mockery.
At a small dinner gathering in Tianjin after the 2022 New Year, Zhou jeered at Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign, the drive to narrow China’s wealth gap: “If everyone gets rich, who will still deliver takeout and tighten screws?” At a Party school graduation forum in 2023, he departed from his script to pun on Xi’s housing slogan. Xi’s formula declares that “housing is for living in, not for speculation,” and in Chinese the word for speculation sounds like the word for quarreling; Zhou rendered it “housing is for living in, no quarreling, and the more you quarrel, the higher prices climb,” bringing the hall down in laughter. And at an October 2023 gathering of local notables in his home city of Hengyang, Hunan, he questioned the ten-year fishing ban on the Yangtze River as “giving up eating for fear of choking,” adding that “policies up top are slapped together on a whim, while legs down below are run off their feet carrying them out.”
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A businessman from his home region recorded the remarks, according to the leaked account, and the audio landed on the desks of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party’s internal enforcement agency.
Cai Xia wrote that the case makes the Party’s expectation plain: Xi wants the Party’s roughly 100 million members to have no minds of their own, its millions of officials to be mutes, and every one of them to serve as slave labor executing one man’s will without deviation. The U.S.-based commentator Cai Shenkun added a biting footnote in reply. Zhou’s greatest “achievement,” he wrote, was coining the formula “loyalty that is not absolute is absolute disloyalty.” Li Hongzhong prized the line, treated it as his own signature aphorism, and deployed it to demonstrate his devotion to Xi, while its actual author rose from Changde to a Tianjin vice mayoralty on the strength of Li’s favor.
Punishing officials for ‘improper discussion’ has become a pattern
Zhou’s case fits a documented shift in what the Party punishes. On June 17, 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported, after reviewing more than 940 disciplinary notices issued by the Party’s top watchdog between 2013 and May 2026, that the purge’s center of gravity has moved from economic crimes and personal misconduct toward political offenses, with accusations like “improperly discussing the central leadership” and “disloyalty and dishonesty” appearing with growing frequency.
On June 5, 2026, Wang Fengchao, a former deputy Party secretary and mayor of Chengdu, was expelled from the Party and public office in a notice that cited “indolent governance” and improper discussion of the central leadership, though what he said has not surfaced. On Feb. 6, 2026, Ni Qiang, formerly the secretary general of Hainan province’s Party committee, was expelled and handed to prosecutors under a notice that accused him of “improperly discussing the Party center’s major policies” while “long engaging in superstitious activities.” An account circulating online holds that Ni told a private banquet that the Hainan Free Trade Port, one of Xi’s showcase development schemes, was doomed to end up an unfinished project, “a second Xiong’an,” a reference to the new city Xi ordered built outside Beijing that critics deride as a ghost town. That conversation too, the account says, was secretly recorded and delivered to the province’s disciplinary commission.
Online commenters drew the obvious moral. A dictator wants servants, not minds, one wrote, because a subordinate who thinks is a threat, and the first rule of serving one is never to let him suspect you are smarter than he is.
The mockery, by several accounts, now runs through the capital’s officialdom. In January 2026, the Australia-based legal scholar Yuan Hongbing said on the Elite Forum program that Xi was once a forbidden topic in Beijing official circles, a name people simply steered around. The word from his contacts in those circles now, Yuan said, is that officials ridicule and satirize Xi almost without restraint in private, and that some highly indecorous nicknames for him circulate freely in their conversations.
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Analysts say Xi created the crime of ‘improper discussion’
The independent commentator Du Zheng, writing earlier in the Taiwanese outlet Up Media, observed that coded jokes about Xi now circulate at dinner tables across China and reliably bring down the house. Xi introduced “improperly discussing the central leadership” as an offense almost immediately after taking power in late 2012, Du noted, as if he had prepared for the day such talk would flourish. Its spread from officialdom into society at large shows that Xi’s authority is spent, and in Du’s reading, the death of a Party leader’s authority and the exhaustion of the Party’s mandate travel together.
Vision Times columnist Jian Yi argued that the officials can hardly be blamed for laughing. The charge of “improper discussion” is itself an advertisement, announcing to everyone that negative talk about Xi exists inside the bureaucracy and comes from every corner of it. Xi may intend the prosecutions as intimidation, but as the old saying goes, where there is injustice, there will be voices, and more than a decade of arrests has proven one thing: even jailing officials by the score, Xi cannot stop the talk.
Jian closed with a line attributed to Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president: “You can build a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long.”
