SinoInsight 1
Sitong Bridge protest
Incident
At about 1:00 p.m. on Oct. 13, a man wearing a yellow safety helmet and orange overalls unfurled two banners on Sitong Bridge north of the 3rd Ring Road in Beijing, according to some videos circulated online. The man also lit an item that produced thick smoke; photos of the place on the bridge where the man stood appeared to be scorched by the item that generated the smoke.
The man used a loudspeaker to blast out what sounded like a pre-recorded message on loop: “We want food, we want to be free, we want votes! Boycott school, go on strike, depose the traitorous dictator Xi Jinping!” (要吃飯, 要自由, 要選票! 罷課, 罷工, 罷免獨裁國賊習近平!)
The words on the banners read:
- “We don’t want nucleic acid tests, we want food; we don’t want lockdowns, we want freedom; we don’t want lies, we want dignity; we don’t want Cultural Revolution, we want reform; we don’t want leaders, we want votes; we don’t want to be slaves, we want to be citizens” (不要核酸要吃飯 不要封控要自由 不要謊言要尊嚴；不要文革要改革 不要領袖要選票 不做奴才做公民).
- “Boycott school, go on strike, depose the traitorous dictator Xi Jinping; stand up and refuse to be slaves! Reject dictatorship, reject authoritarianism, save China; select the president by one person, one vote!!!” (罷課罷工罷免獨裁國賊習近平；起來不願意做奴隸的人們! 反獨裁反專制救中國 一人一票選主席!!!)
Sitong Bridge is about 280 meters and is located above a major intersection with a highway overpass in Haidian District, an affluent part of Beijing. There are several top universities and technology companies in the area.
Stability maintenance
Police arrived on scene shortly after the smoke went up and arrested the man. The man’s banners were taken down and firefighters put out the smoke. According to overseas Chinese language media reports, grassroots officials in Beijing began recruiting “bridge watchers” to work two 12-hour shifts a day. Beginning Oct. 14, several subway stations in Beijing were temporarily closed. On Chinese social media, some city residents claimed that people needed to register their real name when buying cloth exceeding one meter in length and paint; it is unclear which city or cities are making this requirement.
Regime censors also went to work. Searches for words or terms that refer to or could be associated with Sitong Bridge and the man’s actions returned no results, including “Beijing,” “Haidian,” “warrior,” “courageous person,” “courageous warrior,” “courage,” the song “Sitong Bridge,” the song “Warrior of the Darkness” (孤勇者) by Hong Kong singer Eason Chan, and singer Cai Guoqing’s “Beijing Bridge” (北京的橋). A Weibo user in Beijing who posted “I saw it” was reportedly banned from the platform for 60 days, and WeChat allegedly banned about 600,000 people on Oct. 13, according to a netizen citing an “insider source.”
Virtually all mainstream Hong Kong media outlets ignored the incident. HK01, a Chinese language web media that appeared to have carried messaging from factions in the CCP elite, reported on the incident without mentioning the content of the man’s protest message. However, HK01 took down the report a couple of hours later. Hong Kong Free Press, an English-language news website, published a report on the “Sitong Bridge incident” that was still up at the time of writing.
Global attention
The “Sitong Bridge incident” was covered by Taiwanese and Western media outlets. Many foreign journalists and observers praised the man’s bravery. “The guts it took to do this, and the ability to pull it off despite suffocating security, are both astounding,” tweeted Wall Street Journal deputy China bureau chief Josh Chin.
At least one U.S. Senator, Todd Young of Indiana, spotlighted the incident. “Inspiring courage by some Chinese citizens speaking truth to power in the heart of Beijing. They will undoubtedly be punished by the authorities but I pray their acts will encourage more Chinese citizens to fight for a better future than the one imposed on them by the CCP,” he tweeted.
Protestor identity
After the incident, netizens quickly identified the man as Peng Lifa (彭立發). Peng, who goes by “Peng Zaizhou” (彭載舟) online, had previously tweeted the slogans on his banners and the protest plan.
Netizens found that Peng Lifa responded to a tweet from China Digital Times at 4:00 a.m. Beijing time on Oct. 13 by calling for a nationwide school boycott, strikes, car horning, and military uprising on Oct. 16, or the opening day of the 20th Party Congress. “Let the dictator Xi Jinping know that in the pursuit of freedom, there are men in the land of China,” he wrote.
Peng also tweeted, “Dear fellow travelers, we’re about to take action, I hope you can retweet this more, thank you!” and attached a 23-page online document titled, “Link to Strategy to Depose Xi [Jinping].” The document listed several methods of protest, including hanging banners, burning tires in the middle of the road, and setting up road barricades. In particular, the protest method carried out by the man on Sitong Bridge was identical to one of the methods proposed in the document by Peng Lifa.
In another online document, Peng wrote in the foreword: “In 2022, there were even more severe social controls imposed in China that I cannot tolerate, and the Chinese president dreams of illegally staying in office. This exceeds the patience of many people, including myself, and I will devote myself to this historical revolution without hesitation.” He added, “nearly three years of epidemic prevention and control has ended my survival efforts and forcibly pushed me into a virtual prison. Instead, home quarantine has become an opportunity [for me] to think and write.”
After Peng Lifa’s Twitter account gained more attention, tweets by the account calling for strikes and boycotts were suddenly removed, leaving only tweets about his life. PRC public security officials are known to log into the social media accounts of arrested persons and delete their postings without permission.
OUR TAKE
1. The “Sitong Bridge incident” occurred just days before the opening of the 20th Party Congress, and is a black mark for Xi Jinping that signals increasing popular resentment towards his leadership.
For local public security officials, the incident would likely be considered a major “stability maintenance” event and could see some officials being punished over it. The incident would also likely drive public security officials across the regime to step up their “stability maintenance” work and adopt even harsher measures in clamping down on society. The “prefer left rather than right” efforts by public security officials to preserve their careers will increase pressure on a society that is already losing patience with Xi and the Party over “zero-COVID” and other ills.
In shoring up “stability” to prevent another “Sitong Bridge incident,” public security officials could lead to blowback, creating even more favorable conditions for similar incidents to break out and bring social unrest into the spotlight.
2. Peng Lifa’s actions and banners are a reflection of great public displeasure towards Xi and the CCP over Beijing’s draconian measures to control COVID-19 as well as other failed policies in recent years. That Peng was willing to risk everything (the CCP tends to “disappear” such protesters and makes sure that they are never heard from again) to send a message to the Xi leadership during such a politically sensitive period suggests that social contradictions in China have reached a critical point.
There is a possibility that Peng was influenced, supported, or pushed by Xi’s factional rivals to carry out his effectively planned and well-executed protest so close to the 20th Party Congress and in such a dramatic fashion. However, there is scant evidence at present that factional forces were behind Peng’s action, and the explanation that he was driven by desperation to send a political message appears to be the more likely based on publicly available information. Regardless, the “anti-Xi” camp would welcome the “Sitong Bridge incident” and its impact, and could endeavor to steer public discourse and actions in a direction favorable to their agenda.
3. The “Sitong Bridge incident” is not the first time that protesters have singled out Xi for criticism, but it could turn out to be the most impactful.
Two other notable incidents over the past two years include:
- In May 2020, Zhang Guiqi, a poet from Shandong who goes by the moniker “Lu Yang” (魯楊), uploaded a video to WeChat where he recited loudly the following words on a wall: “Xi Jinping must step down, the CCP dictatorship must end” (習近平下台, 中共獨裁政權必須結束). Zhang was sentenced to six years in prison in April 2022. Zhang’s daughter recently took to Twitter to urge the world to pay attention to the message that led to her father’s imprisonment.
- On Jan. 14, 2022, a protester wearing a suit held up a banner and yelled, “Down with Xi Jinping! Oppose constitutional amendments!” on a street near Luohu Port in Shenzhen near the mainland-Hong Kong border. As police arrested the man, he shouted, “If Xi Jinping extends his tenure, China’s reform and opening will be done for.” The protester’s name and whereabouts remain unknown, but overseas Chinese netizens refer to him as the “Luohu Warrior” (羅湖勇士).
SinoInsight 2
Oct. 10
Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister and current president of Asia Society, published a piece in Foreign Affairs magazine about Xi Jinping and ideology.
Rudd claimed that Deng Xiaoping “set aside the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of his predecessor, Mao Zedong, in favor of something more akin to state capitalism” in the 1970s. He added that Deng’s successors “Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed his lead, rapidly expanding the role of the market in the Chinese domestic economy and embracing a foreign policy that maximized China’s participation in a global economic order led by the United States.”
Xi, however, “brought that era of pragmatic, nonideological governance to a crashing halt” and “developed a new form of Marxist nationalism that now shapes the presentation and substance of China’s politics, economy, and foreign policy,” according to Rudd. “Xi’s rise has meant nothing less than the return of Ideological Man,” he continued. Yet Rudd noted that Xi’s “ideological trends are not simply a throwback to the Mao era” because “Xi’s worldview is more complex than Mao’s, blending ideological purity with technocratic pragmatism.”
After making his case for how ideology drives Xi’s policies, Rudd wrote that “Xi faces few political vulnerabilities” but is “not completely secure” due to economic weaknesses. Rudd noted that business confidence is declining in China, as well as China’s attractiveness to foreign investors. “At home, China’s business elites have been spooked by the anti-corruption campaign, the arbitrary nature of the party-controlled judicial system, and a growing number of high-profile tech titans falling out of political favor. And China has yet to figure out how to leave behind its “zero covid” strategy, which has compounded the country’s economic slowdown,” Rudd wrote. “Adding to these weaknesses are a number of long-term structural trends: a rapidly aging population, a shrinking workforce, low productivity growth, and high levels of debt shared between state and private financial institutions.”
Rudd then argued that instead of engineering a course correction to recover from the significant slowing of economic growth, Xi will more likely “try to muddle through, making as few ideological and rhetorical adjustments as possible and putting in place a new team of economic policymakers, hoping they can find a way to magically restore growth.”
Rudd continued, “Xi’s embrace of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy should put to rest any wishful thinking that Xi’s China might peacefully liberalize its politics and economy. And it should make clear that China’s approach to foreign policy is driven not only by a rolling calculus of strategic risk and opportunity but also by an underlying belief that the forces of historical change are inexorably driving the country forward.”
Near the end of the essay, Rudd noted that “Xi’s adherence to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy has helped him consolidate his personal power. But this same ideological stance has also created dilemmas that the CCP will find difficult to resolve, especially as slowing economic growth puts in doubt the party’s long-standing social contract with the people.” He then encouraged the United States and its allies to “radical[ly] reembrace … the principles that distinguish liberal-democratic political systems” to prevail in ideological conflict with Xi.
Oct. 11
In a rare public speech to the Royal United Services Institute think tank, UK Government Communications Headquarters director Jeremy Fleming sounded a warning about the CCP and its technological threat to the world. Fleming’s speech came four days after the U.S. imposed chip restrictions on the PRC.
Noteworthy points made by Fleming include:
- “… we certainly have no issue with the people of China and the Chinese community who contribute hugely to life here in the UK. The UK wants to compete and to collaborate with a strong China. But it’s how that strength is used — or misused — by the Chinese Communist Party that’s at the heart of the issues we face.
- “… we must also be clear that when it comes to technology, the politically motivated actions of the Chinese state is an increasingly urgent problem we have to acknowledge and address.”
- The “Chinese leadership’s approach is to also see (technology) as a tool to gain advantage through control: of their markets, of those in their sphere of influence and of course of their own citizens.”
- The CCP leadership “saw the potential of cyber to seize an advantage over their competitors, or to clamp down on consent. They recognized the need to bend international flows of data around the Indo-Pacific region towards interception platforms inside China. They sought to steal data from deep within the critical infrastructure of countries across the world, especially those selling raw materials to Beijing, hosting allied military bases, or with industries competing with those owned by the Party elite.”
- Beijing’s implementation of centralized digital currency “allows the monitoring of citizens and it forces companies to use the service,” and could in future also “enable China to partially evade the sorts of international sanctions currently being applied to Putin’s regime in Russia.”
- The CCP is believed to be “building a powerful anti-satellite capability, with a doctrine of denying other nations access to space in the event of a conflict.”
1. The Biden administration published its National Security Strategy (NSS). Most of the points about the PRC that were raised in the NSS corresponded with the China strategy announced by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May 2022.
The NSS notably prioritized China before Russia in commenting on America’s strategic competitors. “The People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit,” the document stated. “We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia.”
2. Kevin Rudd published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal where he noted that Xi Jinping will “rebalance strategic priorities” at the 20th Party Congress and rehashed arguments about ideology from his Oct. 10 Foreign Affairs essay.
Noteworthy points of Rudd’s piece include:
- “Mr. Xi is an ideological fundamentalist who has moved the Communist Party to the Leninist left, the economy to the Marxist left, and China’s foreign and security policy to the nationalist right.”
- “On the economy, Mr. Xi recognizes that China’s growth is faltering.” But ideology “is the main problem.” Rudd tells readers not to expect “any dramatic ideological recommitment to the market from his [20th Party Congress] work report. Mr. Xi could well decide to move further to the ideological left, despite the predictable effect it would have on growth.”
- Rudd believes that Xi is “likely to use his report to define China’s new strategic environment in a manner that gives national security priority over the economy. This may signal that China is gradually moving toward a long-term war footing.” Rudd expects “confrontation” between Beijing and Washington to come in the 2030s unless “the U.S., its allies and Taiwan build an effective military and economic deterrence in the meantime.”
OUR TAKE
1. We have long been warning about the CCP’s pernicious Marxist-Leninist ideology, influence operations, and ideologically-driven world domination agenda (for examples, see here, here, and here). We also highlighted the importance of differentiating between the CCP and the Chinese people, and made the case for why the CCP fears an ideological battle.
Now governments, scholars, NGOs, Western media outlets, and the international community are increasingly calling attention to the issues about the CCP that we have been constantly raising. They are also taking heed to distinguish between the Chinese people and the Party, are referring to “China” as the “PRC” in strategic documents and speeches, and are recognizing the importance of challenging the CCP on ideological grounds. Further, Western governments are also getting more serious about countering the CCP threat and checking Beijing’s domination agenda. These developments are heartening, and should be rapidly adopted and expanded.
Businesses, investors, and governments must account for the international community’s growing willingness to stand up to Communist China and the corresponding trend of rising political risks in China.
2. Xi Jinping’s policies are undoubtedly a key factor spurring the international community’s awakening to the CCP threat. Xi also should be rightly called to account for the gross human rights abuses in China, advancing the CCP’s domination agenda at home and abroad, and other condemnable actions. But as we explained in our Oct. 11, 2022 newsletter, the international community should be careful to avoid singular focus on criticism of Xi lest the CCP gain a much-needed lifeline and survive international pressure to resume its domination quest in more insidious forms. Observers who believe that China and the world’s problems would be resolved once Xi is gone should be aware that he is a symptom, and not an aberration, of the Party system; those succeeding Xi could “ultimately prove to be just as willing—if not politically obliged—to continue in the same pernicious cycle of expanding regime power and human rights abuse,” as we wrote on April 18.
On that note, Kevin Rudd has a recent history of targeting Xi while “sparing” his predecessors and the Party from censure (see here, here, here). Rudd’s latest Foreign Affairs piece on Xi and ideology stretches the aforementioned line of argument a little too far. For one, the CCP and all its leaders have never abandoned Marxism-Leninism (the Party constitution has always stated that the CCP uses Marxism-Leninism and the theories of Party leaders as its “guides to action”) as even as they embraced the market economy. Xi has also shown to be far more flexible on policy and willing to open up markets to foreigners (ending foreign ownership limits on financial firms, for example) than Rudd gives him credit for; if anything, the CCP’s position as an ideological party has created dilemmas that Xi has found difficult to resolve, not the other way around as Rudd asserts.
Further, Xi has liberalized and opened up China’s markets to a higher degree in recent years as compared to during Deng’s time and the Jiang-Hu era, and is still encouraging foreign investment in key industries; it should be noted that while Xi is not a Marxist-Leninist purist, he is embracing the markets and capital out of pragmatic necessity to ensure the regime’s survival and dominance. Xi has also adhered to Party orthodoxy and not Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, to consolidate power; Marxism-Leninism does not call for the designation of a “core” leader (this uniquely CCP tradition was established by Deng), does not say anything about current leaders borrowing tokens of “quan wei” from former leaders to strengthen their position (see Xi using phrases associated with Mao like “people’s leader” and “helmsman”), and does not have anything to do with “Sinicized Marxism” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (CCP-invented “ideological” orthodoxy).
Rudd’s argumentation in his recent essays about Xi suits the “anti-Xi, not anti-CCP” agenda. Noteworthy also are Rudd’s attempts to point out that the economy is Xi’s weakness and make observations that would naturally spook foreign investors away from China. “Anti-Xi, not anti-CCP” maneuvers could squeeze Xi in the short-run and even potentially trigger events that give Xi serious political trouble, but will ultimately undermine efforts to bring about a fundamental resolution to the CCP problem and end the plight of the Chinese people.
3. Xi Jinping is poised to secure a third term at the 20th Party Congress and most of his political objectives. Mounting international pressure against him and the CCP, however, means that his problems will have only just begun after his latest round of power consolidation.
