Yujing Shentu
Lately, a wave of speculation has emerged in Western media asking whether Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping is losing his grip. Faced with rising youth unemployment, elite disaffection, and a deteriorating administrative apparatus, it’s tempting to believe the Chinese leader is on the way out. But this narrative, while seductive, fundamentally misreads the evolving architecture of digital authoritarianism in China.
What looks like volatility is often a carefully staged illusion. For those unfamiliar with China’s digital ecology, a surge in online dissent might be taken as a sign of insecurity. But through the lens of inter-network society, this is precisely how power is maintained. Rather than crumbling, Xi Jinping’s regime has grown more sophisticated – tightening its control through new instruments of emotional manipulation and algorithmic governance.
The internet is not a battlefield between free voices and censors, but a state-engineered matrix of inter-subjectivity – a shared sense of what can be thought, felt, and done. The CCP doesn’t just control what is seen; it shapes how people feel about what they see, and how they believe others feel too. Kevin J. O’Brien’s 1996 theory of “rightful resistance” still resonates – but the CCP has built pathways to reroute it. The result is a feedback loop: digital advocacy exists not to contest power, but to strengthen the state’s claim to moral authority. By allowing selective grievances to surface, the party presents itself as receptive. But the moment grievances become systemic or principle-based, they are erased.
A striking example came on June 24 with the viral case of the “Guangxi Girl.” A video posted on Douyin (Chinese TikTok), and widely reshared, showed a young woman from Guangxi province being abruptly seized and taken away in an ambulance. Her cries – “I have hepatitis B!” – triggered a wave of online speculation that she was being forcibly hospitalized or worse. The comments discuss poverty, health, and public distrust – all sensitive topics for the CCP.
In Xi’s China, online discussion of cases like Guangxi Girl’s is allowed – until the focus shifts from interest to rights. The existence of such online content shows not the fragility of Xi’s rule, but its sophistication. The debate was allowed, even as official media labeled the story “fake news” and proclaimed that the original poster of the video had been punished.
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