Is There Anything to the Rumors About Xi Xinping?

I’m not sure if there is really something to these reports but I’ll admit I’m hoping the rumors are true. Last week Gen. Mike Flynn posted this alert about a power shift in China:





Not a lot of details there but a couple days later a former US diplomat published an opinion piece in the NY Post titled “Is Chinese President Xi Jinping on his way out?” 

Over the past few months, unprecedented developments point to the potential, and potentially imminent, fall of China’s “Chairman of Everything” Xi Jinping. Chinese Communist Party elders — including Hu Jintao, Xi’s immediate predecessor, whom Xi humiliated at the 20th Party Congress in 2022 — are now running things behind the scenes…

Xi’s downfall has been rumored before. But never have we seen the recent purges (and mysterious deaths) of dozens of People’s Liberation Army generals loyal to Xi; all replaced by non-Xi loyalists.

Zhang Youxia, with whom Xi had a major falling out after helping Xi secure an unprecedented third five-year term, is now the de facto leader of the PLA.

It’s hard to track all of these stories down in English because it appears a lot of them didn’t make it to US papers. But there are some recent stories that jibe with the idea something is shifting in China. For instance:

China’s top legislature has voted to remove senior military official Miao Hua from the Central Military Commission, its highest-level military command body, according to a statement published Friday by Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.

Miao, 69, was put under investigation for “serious violations of discipline” in November. The former political ideology chief of the People’s Liberation Army was also suspended from his post.

The Xinhua statement did not contain any other details, but the move marks another stage in President Xi Jinping’s ongoing anti-corruption purge of China’s military, in which over a dozen PLA generals and a handful of defense industry executives have been implicated.





Is there corruption in the PLA? Probably. But it’s also possible these moves have something to do with Xi trying to purge anyone he thinks might challenge him. Making up a legal pretext to punish someone is standard operating procedure in China. But there were other signs something might be up:

Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attend next week’s Brics summit in Rio de Janeiro, marking his first-ever absence from the gathering of leading emerging economies, the Post learned from multiple sources on Tuesday.

According to officials familiar with the matter, Beijing told the Brazilian government that Xi had a scheduling conflict. Instead, Premier Li Qiang is expected to lead the Chinese delegation, as he did at the G20 summit in India in 2023…

Speculation has circulated that Lula’s invitation to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a state dinner following the Brics summit may have influenced Beijing’s decision, as Xi could have been “perceived as a supporting actor” at the gathering.

So maybe this is just about not looking like 2nd fiddle to India but it’s still unusual Xi would miss this. There also seems to be something happening with state media:

Xi has also been conspicuously missing from the pages of the People’s Daily, the CCP organ that until recently ran fawning front-page stories on Xi daily…

And following his recent call with President Trump, Chinese state media, including state TV, referred to Xi without any formal title at all. This has never happened before.





The Jamestown Foundation, a think tank, suggests this is a sign Xi’s power is waning.

In the PRC’s most important diplomatic mission this year, Xi apparently failed to demonstrate strong leadership. Following negotiations with the Trump administration in Geneva on May 11–12 and then in London on June 10–11, neither Xi’s name nor Xi Jinping Thought was mentioned in comments from either the Foreign Ministry, the Commerce Ministry, or Vice-Premier He Lifeng (何立峰)—a close Xi ally and lead negotiator with the Americans (BBC Chinese, June 11)…

Domestically, citations of Xi’s name have become thinner and thinner in authoritative official media, including in the People’s Daily, Xinhua, and CCTV. For example, an article on the front page of the June 10 issue of the People’s Daily announced the release of an Opinion from the General Office of the CCP Central Committee on improving people’s livelihood. The measures discussed include boosting medical and social welfare handouts. Here, too, there was no mention of either Xi Jinping’s guidance or that cadres must follow Xi Jinping Thought while executing this important series of policies (People’s Daily, March 2).

Reference to Xi was also absent from a ceremony held by the State Council in early June. At the event, nearly 50 central government officials including ministers and department heads pledged their loyalty to the PRC Constitution (Xinhua, June 11). Premier Li Qiang (李强) oversaw the ceremony and called for implementing the plans of the CCP Central Committee but made no mention of Xi Jinping.





This group actually totaled the number of headlines this year and in the same period last year and found only a slight decline. So maybe Xi’s disappearance is a bit overstated but it does seem as if something is shifting a bit. Could he be ill? Is he stepping back because he’s under pressure from poor economic performance? The reasons aren’t clear either but it’s something that’s probably worth watching. 







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