From Gaddafi to Khamenei: What History Reveals About Xi Jinping’s Final Days | Digging into China

Hi, I'm Dong Xiong. Welcome to Digging into China, where we take a deep dive into what's really happening in China and share some unique insights. I want to do a series of programs with one theme, Xi Jinping's endgame. I already did one video earlier about the possible outcomes for Xi Jinping. So why am I talking about this topic again now? I'm not simply repeating my previous analysis. I want to pull the perspective wider and dig deeper. Last time, we focused on how Xi Jinping planted the seeds of his own downfall through large-scale purges, and we looked at several sudden endings he might face, including long-wolf assassination from inside, or a Ceausescu-style popular uprising leading to a coup and execution. We also compared historical cases of Park Chun-hee. This time, I want to combine the latest shifts in the international landscape, the ongoing evolution of China's internal structural contradictions, and the hidden mechanism of power transition to give a full three-dimensional review. This topic deserves to be explored and updated again and again, because it is not just idle curiosity or political speculation. It is directly connected to the future direction of China. Just this year, three things happened in the world. When you put these three things together, they changed our basic judgment about how long a dictator can actually survive. The first event was the arrest of Maduro on January 3rd. The second event came two months later on February 28th in Tehran. Khomeini was assassinated. The third event was on March 13th when the Cuban president announced the start of negotiations with the United States. Maduro arrested, Khomeini blown up, Cuba beginning to negotiate surrender. Do you feel it? The fall of dictators is speeding up. So today we are going to discuss a bigger question. What will be the end for China's dictator? This series is divided into two episodes. In this first episode, we will do two main things. First, we will clearly identify the four layers of pressure Xi Jinping faces today. Then we will spend a lot of time opening the death files of seven historical dictators. Gaddafi, Saddam, Ceausescu, Stalin, Milosevic, Mubarak, and Khomeini. Each one represents a different type of endgame. After that, we will break down Xi Jinping's five special lines of defense and examine the cracks hidden inside each one. In the next episode, we will dig deep into his six most likely endings, weight the probabilities, analyze the trigger conditions, and finally discuss what his endgame means for China and for the world. First, let's look at the first dimension of this question. Where does the pressure come from? To talk about endgame, we naturally have to understand first what forces are capable of ending it. Because in history, the way a dictator dies is often decided by the nature of the force that finally ends him. For example, Gaddafi dies under the guns of his own people. It was a popular uprising. Saddam died on the gallows. It was after foreign invasion and the collapse of his regime. Stalin may have died from a conspiracy by his own inner circle. It was people living in fear at the very core of the totalitarian system who made a silent choice at a critical moment. Today, the pressure facing Xi Jinping comes from four directions. We all know that during Trump's second term, America's policy toward China has changed completely. Before it was compete but manage the risk. Now what is it? It is you die, I live. Tariff wars, technology blockades, financial decooling, and military encirclement are all being carried out at the same time. But what truly changed the historical coordinates were the two events involving Maduro and Khomeini. These two events sent a signal to Beijing that had never been sent before. The United States no longer has any hesitation about taking direct action against the dictator himself. Psychologically, this is a massive upgrade. It forces every person inside the Zhongnanhai to seriously consider a question they never needed to consider seriously before. Over these years, the Chinese Communist Party has purged millions of officials through its anti-corruption campaign. These were not ordinary officials. We are talking about the people at the level of Zhou Yongkang, Bo Xilai, Sun Zhengcai, Li Shangfu, Qin Gang. The Politburo, the Standing Committee, the Central Military Commission. People have fallen from all of them. Every purge is the collapse of an entire network of relationships, and the resentment is quietly building up somewhere. The people who were brought down have families, disciples, and former colleagues. Their hatred does not disappear just because they were taken down. And those who luckily survived live in fear. But that fear is also accumulating. This is an even deeper problem. After Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party had an unwritten rule, collective leadership, taking turns in power, limited terms, and checks and balances among each other. The rule was not perfect, but it gave the elite class a feeling, I am part of a community of shared interests, I have my position, I have my security. Xi Jinping completely dismantled this rule. He amended the constitution to remove term limits, promoted a personality cult, and made one man call all the shots. What is the result? The elites are now deeply tied to him, but they have no way to restrain him. They have changed from a community of shared interests into captives of his fate. This kind of structure has never been stable in history. This is not a periodic adjustment. It is a structural, slow-motion collapse. Let's start with real estate. In China, the wealth illusion of an entire generation of middle class is breaking apart. It is not just the Evergrande or Country Garden. Almost every Chinese person put their life savings into that one apartment. And now those apartments are losing value. Next is youth unemployment. The official numbers stopped telling the truth long ago. Today's popular expressions like lying flat, letting it rot, are all connected to youth unemployment. These are not just internet slang, they represent a generation expressing their political attitude in a roundabout way. Then there is local government debt. Hundreds of trillions in hidden black holes are slowly suffocating the entire fiscal system. Some local governments have already started failing to pay salaries. What is even more fatal is that Xi Jinping cannot truly solve these problems, because all the economically correct solutions conflict with his political logic. He has turned economic problems into ideological ones. Security comes before efficiency. Party leadership reaches deep into every enterprise. A China that keeps getting poorer is the deepest crack in his governing legitimacy. Taiwan can be said to be the historical shackle Xi Jinping has put on himself. At the 20th Party Congress, he wrote unification into the historical mission, amending the constitution and removing term limits was, to some extent, telling the whole party, the whole army, and the whole country, I want to see this happen in my lifetime. That sentence pushed him into a corner with no way out. If he does not act, his narrative as the eternal leader is empty. But if he does act, both outcomes could be disastrous. If he loses, his power-legitimacy collapse completely. That is easy to understand. But what if he wins? Many people think winning means everything is fine. Actually, no. If he wins, the world's harshest economic sanctions will kick in immediately. Chinese exports will fall off a cliff, foreign capital will withdraw, the financial system will be badly damaged, and then you still have to face a Taiwan that has been destroyed by war and whose people completely refuse to accept the situation. They will carry out guerrilla warfare and resistance every day. The army will have fought a war with heavy casualties. The generals' feelings towards the decision-maker will probably not be gratitude. They will more likely be resentment, because it was he who pushed them into this war. History has a very precise precedent. In 1982, Argentina's General Gattieri launched the Falcon's War, hoping a nationalist victory would solidify his regime. The British fought back. After the defeat, his military government fell apart within months, and he himself ended up in prison. Taiwan may be the Chinese Communist Party's final gamble. Both outcomes could lead to the endgame. Only the triggering mechanisms would be different. Alright, that covers the four layers of pressure. Now with this understanding, let's open the death files of these dictators. I chose seven cases, not for sensationalism, but because each one represents a different type of endgame. Only by understanding these seven endings can we truly understand what might happen in China's future. Case 1. Libyan leader Gaddafi. On October 20, 2011, Gaddafi's hometown of Sutok had already become ruins. The man who had ruled Libya for 42 years was hiding inside and abandoned sewer pipe. Imagine the scene. Just a few months earlier, he was the supreme leader of the country. He had given a 94-minute speech at the United Nations General Assembly, one of the longest in UN history. Everyone sat there listening, no one dared to leave. Now he was hiding in a sewer pipe. NATO warplanes had destroyed his escape convoy. He and a few bodyguards fled in panic and hid in a roadside concrete drainage pipe. A young rebel soldier followed the sound and found him. Gaddafi crawled out of the pipe. His first words were, don't shoot, don't shoot. At that moment, he was still holding a golden pistol in his hand. That gun gave him no protection. He was captured alive. The rebel soldiers dragged him wildly onto a pickup truck, took photos, humiliated him, and beat him. In the video, Gaddafi looked at them in confusion and asked, what did I ever do to you? Then he was shot in the head and abdomen and died on the way to the hospital. The exact circumstances of his death are still debated. Some say he was killed by a stray bullet during the fighting. Others say he was deliberately executed by the soldiers. His body was later placed in a cold storage room in Misrata and put on public display for several days. People lined up to view it. A leader who ruled for 42 years became an exhibit after death. Gaddafi's lesson can be summed up in one sentence. A man who rules by fear rather than by genuine belief. Once the fear machine stops turning, even his bodyguards will betray him. Remember this sentence, we will come back to it again and again. The second case is Iraq's ruler, Saddam. In December 2003, outside a farm near Tikrit, American soldiers pulled Saddam out of a hole in the ground. The man who had ruled Iraq with an iron fist for more than 20 years, was found curled up in a hole about 2 meters deep and less than 2 square meters in size. His beard was messy, he was exhausted, and he offered no resistance. After he was brought out, an American soldier shone a flashlight into his mouth to check his teeth. The scene looked like someone inspecting livestock. That image shocked the entire Arab world. Then came a long trial that lasted almost a year. In court, Saddam refused to recognize the legitimacy of the tribunal. He insisted that the people call him President of the Republic of Iraq. He cursed the judges as American puppets. He made no attempt to hide some of the crimes of his regime and even defended himself with righteous indignation. He did not kneel, he did not beg, he did not break. On December 30, 2006, during Iraq's Eid al-Adha, Saddam was led to the gallows. The entire execution was secretly recorded on a cell phone by someone present and then spread across the global internet. In the video, before the hanging, people shouted insults at him. Some loudly called out the name of Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadda, a name Saddam hated more than any other political enemy in his life. Saddam almost lost control, but he held it in. The noose was placed around his neck. He refused the hood. He refused to beg. The rope tightened and his body swung. The execution scene caused worldwide controversy, not because people felt sympathy for Saddam, but because the process looked far more like revenge than like justice. What Saddam tells us is this. Outside forces can overthrow a regime, but when a real state is not rebuilt afterward, justice itself can become another form of violence. The third case is Romania Communist Party General Secretary Ceaușescu. This is actually the one I most want to share with you. Not because it is the bloodiest, but because it is the most shocking. On December 21, 1989, at the Palace of the People in Bucharest, Nicolae Ceaușescu stood on the balcony addressing 100,000 people who had been forced to attend. He had done this routine many times before, but this time something was different. Eight minutes into the speech, someone in the crowd threw a firecracker. Chaos began. At that moment, the live television broadcast suddenly cut off and the screen turned solid red. This image was broadcast simultaneously on every television set across the country. In that instant, everyone understood. When other countries' live broadcasts are interrupted, what does that mean? Everyone knew in their hearts. What happened next moved very fast. The army switched sides. The people occupied the party headquarters. Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled by helicopter in panic. But the state radio had already broadcast news of their escape. The pilot could not bear the pressure and landed midway. The Ceaușescus forced their way into a private car and continued fleeing. But they were eventually stopped by police. They were placed under protective detention in the military barracks. From his last public speech to his execution, it took the country's leader only four days. On December 25, 1989, Christmas Day, the trial against Ceaușescu opened at one in the afternoon. The lawyer went through the formalities and asked Elena, Do you have any mental illness? There was a hidden meaning in that question. If she said yes, the law required her to be sent for hospital examination, which could delay things for months and perhaps open room for negotiation. But Elena arrogantly said no. Ceaușescu completely ignored the court and refused to recognize its legitimacy. In less than two hours, he was sentenced to death and the sentence was to be carried out immediately. At four in the afternoon, in front of a wall outside the barracks toilet, the Ceaușescus had their hands tied with a thick rope. Three paratroopers with AK-47s stood ready. But one soldier could not wait any longer. His brother had died under the guns of the suppression. He carried a deep hatred for Ceaușescu. He fired first. Bullets sprayed out. Ceaușescu fell to his knees after being hit. His eyes remained open after death. His wife was shot in the head and her skull was cracked open. It is said that more than 120 bullets hit the two bodies combined. But the most absurd part of the story is still to come. After the execution, the people involved in the trial were in a hurry to fly back to Bucharest by helicopter for dinner. Before leaving, they wrapped the two bodies in a blanket and casually tossed them onto a nearby sports field. That evening, a handball team came for training. They saw two big bundles lying on the field getting in the way, so they simply moved them behind a dirt mound. They had no idea what was inside. The next morning, when officials came back to collect the bodies, they searched for a long time before finding them behind a dirt mound. A supreme leader who had ruled Romania for 25 years spent his first night after death being moved around like garbage by handball players. Every time I think of this detail, I feel it carries more power than any political commentary. When he was alive, everyone bowed to him. At the There is one more detail I must mention separately. In July 1971, Ceausescu visited China, and in August he visited North Korea. After returning, he issued the July Thesis and began vigorously promoting a personality cult in Romania. The official titles given to him were Genius of the Carpathians, Dainyu of Thoughts, and Outstanding Figure of the Contemporary World. Don't these titles sound a little familiar? I won't say more. You can think about it yourselves. Ceausescu's lesson is this. Speed is the cruelest force in history. From a rally of 100,000 cheering people to execution beside a barrack toilet, it took only 4 days. A dictator always overestimates himself and always underestimates the anger that has been building up for a long time, waiting for just one opening. The fourth case is one that everyone is very familiar with, Stalin. On the evening of February 28, 1953, a Saturday, Stalin invited 4 people to dinner at his private residence. The 4 were Khrushchev, Melnikov, Beria, and Burganin. All 4 would later become major players in the struggle for Soviet power. That night they watched a movie together, drank, and talked until 4 in the morning. It is said Stalin was in a very good mood that day. He even poked Khrushchev in the stomach with his finger and laughed while calling him Mikita, the Ukrainian way of saying his name. The guests left, and up to that point, everything was normal. The next day Stalin made no sound. The guards on duty did not dare to enter because Stalin had given an order. No one could enter his room without being summoned. That very order left a man who had already collapsed on the floor lying there for who knows how long. A dictator who had kept millions living in fear. When he himself most needed help, his guards were too afraid of the same fear to open that door. Eventually one soldier gathered the courage to go in and found Stalin had fainted on the floor. His pants were wet with urine, and a pocket watch lay scattered nearby. The news was passed to the 4 guests who had just left. They came, walked around twice, then went off to a meeting. The great dictator who was supposed to live forever lay on the floor in wet pants for more than 4 hours while no one called a doctor. By the time doctors were finally called, nearly 13 hours had passed. Stalin died on March 5, 1953. The official announcement was a cerebral hemorrhage, but there were too many suspicious points. There were large areas of bleeding in the lining of Stalin's mouth. Not a typical symptom of a cerebral hemorrhage, but more like poisoning. The doctors who treated him died one after another under strange circumstances afterward. The pathologists who performed the autopsy all disappeared from history. Of the three mineral water bottles handed over, only two remained when they were transferred. The third one went missing. Medical records were altered multiple times with obvious discrepancies between versions. Borea later reportedly boasted to Molotov, I let him in, I saved all of you. The 2013 declassified autopsy report concluded natural death due to severe hardening of the blood vessel in the brain. But debate about Stalin's death has never stopped. Was it a stroke suffered by an overworked old man or carefully planned palace murder? This question may never have an answer. But what I want to say is that the most profound part of Stalin's case is not whether he was poisoned, but that the four men knew he had fallen and still chose to let him lie there for 13 more hours. Whether or not anyone poisoned him, that choice itself already says everything. A dictator who spent his whole life creating fear. That fear ultimately became the direct reason he was abandoned by everyone at his most vulnerable moment. He made everyone afraid of him, and when he truly felt helpless, the people closest to him chose to stand by and do nothing. This is the coldest retribution of dictatorial power. No revolution needed, no outside forces needed, just time and the people living in the same fear making a silent choice at a certain window. The fifth case is Slobodin Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Milosevic's story represents the most hidden path, betrayal by his own people. In 2000, during the presidential election in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Milosevic lost an election he tried to manipulate. The people took to the streets, he could not hold on and resigned. The matter could have ended there. But on April 1, 2001, the new government's prime minister Zoran Djindjic, in order to obtain American aid, bypassed parliament and used an administrative order to forcibly extradite Milosevic to the Hague International Tribunal. The man who betrayed him had grown up inside his own system and had once given him protection. The Hague Tribunal charged him with 66 counts including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and extermination. From beginning to end, Milosevic denied the legitimacy of the court, pleaded not guilty, and defended himself. The trial dragged on for a full four years. His health steadily deteriorated in detention. He applied several times to go to Russia for medical treatment but was refused. On March 11, 2006, less than three weeks before the final verdict, he was found dead in his bed in the Hague prison cell. The official cause was a myocardial infarction, natural death. But his lawyer said that in the days before his death, he had been very uneasy and repeatedly said, someone wants to poison me. A substance that could interfere with his high blood pressure medication was later found in his blood. The authorities refused to allow Russia to participate in an independent autopsy. Then, a full 10 years after his death, in 2016, the Hague Tribunal announced that Milosevic was not guilty. The evidence was insufficient and all the main charges could not be established. History played a very cruel joke. A man died in prison carrying the stigma of war criminal and a genocidal perpetrator, only to be declared innocent 10 years later. Milosevic tells us something many people did not expect. The real danger to a dictator often does not come from opponents, but from his own people. Those who grew up under his protection and benefited inside his system will. At the moment, the regime loosens, sells him out without hesitation in exchange for their own safety. In this regard, Chinese Communist Party history has far too many precedents. The sixth case is Mubarak. This may be the outcome Xi Jinping most hopes to have, yet almost no dictator ever gets it. Mubarak's case represents the rarest kind of dictator's endgame, the soft landing. In 2011, during the Arab Spring, hundreds of thousands gathered in Cairo's Tahiha Square. Mubarak had ruled Egypt for 30 years, yet he only lasted 18 days before he quietly announced his resignation. He did not choose to fight to the death. He did not flee overnight. He chose to step down. Afterward, he was placed under house arrest, tried by his own country's courts, sentenced, retried, and had his sentence changed. He went back and forth between prison and house arrest. Then in February 2020, at the age of 91, he died a natural death in a military hospital in Cairo, with his family by his side. Among all the dictators who fell during the Arab Spring, Gaddafi died in the street, Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, Saleh was assassinated. Mubarak was the only one who died of old age in his own country, in his own bed. Why was Mubarak able to do this? The key condition was that the Egyptian army did not completely betray him. They only wanted him to leave, not to die. The army managed a controlled transition. You step down, we guarantee your safety. If you don't step down, things will be different. So Mubarak stepped down. Isn't this the kind of ending every dictator most hopes for? But perhaps it is. But can it happen in China? That is a question we will answer in the next episode. Finally, let's talk about the last case, Khamenei. The incident actually started with intelligence. Informants from American and Israel intelligence agencies provided information that Khamenei would personally attend a high-level security meeting at his residence on the morning of February 28. The U.S. military struck first, using Tomahawk missiles and electronic warfare aircraft to destroy Iran's air defense system. Then Israeli F-35 fighter jets carrying precision-guided bombs headed straight for the center of Tehran. Khamenei's office building instantly turned into rubble. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren died with him. Iranian television first denied it, then had to admit it step by step. Khamenei's death announced the arrival of a new era. Under the combination of precise intelligence and precision-guided weapons, the supreme leader of a sovereign country can be eliminated by targeted strike in the most central building of his own capital in broad daylight. This fact has changed the security calculations of all dictators. All right, the seven cases are finished. Now we face the most critical question. What is the essential difference between China's dictator and these people? Before answering that, let's first look at one person who is still alive, Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un is one of the most extreme dictators in the world today. His rule is more closed than Gaddafi's, more brutal than Maduro's, and he faces continuous military pressure from the United States, South Korea, and Japan. He executed his own uncle Jang Song-thak and poisoned his half-brother Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur airport. Logically, he should have followed in the footsteps of those other dictators long ago. Yet he is living quite well. There is only one answer. Nuclear weapon. With nuclear weapon, any Maduro-style surprise attack, or any Kameny-style decapitation must calculate the cost of nuclear retaliation. That cost is something no country is willing to bear right now. Nuclear threat is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for a dictator, not because it guarantees the dictator will live, but because it forces any outside force that wants him dead to hit the brakes at the final step. And that is Xi Jinping's strongest first line of defense. But Kim Jong-un also tells us the boundary of this line of defense. Nuclear weapons can block outside forces, but they cannot block internal forces, and they cannot block his own body from collapsing. If an internal coup happens in North Korea one day, nuclear weapons will be useless to Kim Jong-un. That is also why Kim Jong-un has put to death the people closest to him, his uncle, his brother. He knows clearly that the real threat is not south of the 38th parallel, but inside the meeting room of Pyongyang. This logic applies in China too, and it is even more complicated. Let's go through his five lines of defense one by one and look at the cracks hidden inside each one. The path of direct outside action is sealed off by nuclear deterrence. The Chinese Communist Party is a massive machine with 96 million party members, millions of soldiers, millions of police, and millions of bureaucrats. Its historical resilience has been tested for more than 100 years. It survived the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Xi Jinping did something no previous leader had done. He personalized this machine to an extreme degree. By bringing down Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, the two vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission, he carried out the largest purge of the military since the founding of the country. Then He Weidong and Miao Hua fell one after another. The rocket force was almost completely cleaned out. He tried to build a Xi family army system centered on himself, making the military absolutely loyal to him personally rather than to any faction or network inside the army. It sounds very safe, doesn't it? But in January 2026, something happened that made the entire China-watching community gasp. Xi Jinping's big brother, Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia fell. Let me explain what big brother means here. Zhang Youxia and Xi Jinping have been friends since childhood. Their fathers fought side by side during the civil war in the 1940s. Xi Jinping personally calls him big brother. After the first wave of military purges, Zhang Youxia rose up and was seen by everyone as Xi Jinping's most trusted ally in the army, the core figure controlling the military. Then on a bone-chilling, overcast winter day, those are the Wall Street Journal's exact words, Zhang Youxia was preparing to go to the Central Party School to attend a seminar attended by hundreds of high-level officials. Xi Jinping was also supposed to be there. But in the end, he never arrived at the venue. According to people close to China's decision-making circle, security personnel sent by Xi Jinping intercepted Zhang Youxia on his way to the Central Party School. He was taken to a secret location. His residence was searched. His son, who worked as a military researcher, was detained. The event itself was shocking enough. But what was even more shocking was that before Xi Jinping made his move, he quietly did one thing. Several days before Zhang Youxia was taken away, Xi Jinping secretly appointed a new commander to take over the Beijing Garrison Command, the elite unit responsible for protecting the capital. This new commander came from the Shanghai Armed Police Force, breaking the previous tradition of appointing army officers to this position. People close to the decision-making circle say that the only purpose of this unusual move was to ensure that the capital's defense was controlled by someone personally loyal to Xi Jinping, rather than by any military network connected to Zhang Youxia. Think about it carefully, what does this mean? It means that before dealing with his most trusted military ally Zhang Youxia, Xi Jinping first had to quietly replace the head of the capital's internal security, because he was not sure which side the original unit would stand on if he moved against Zhang Youxia. A supreme commander who claims to have absolute control over the military, before arresting his closest general, he first had to secretly replace the capital's internal guard commander. This detail explains the depth of the cracks in his line of defense more powerfully than any analysis. Professor Pei Mingxin of Claremont McKenna College in California said this after Zhang Youxia's incident. Zhang Youxia's fall shows that Xi Jinping's one-man rule has entered a new stage. Institutional trust has completely dissipated. He no longer governs through stable alliances but relies on endless cycles of political purges to maintain power. There is one more detail worth mentioning. After Zhang Youxia was investigated, the Central Military Commission issued several directives to the five theater commands, the rocket force, navy, and other systems, according to people familiar with the military structure. At the implementation end, there were frequent delays in feedback. Some units only gave formal responses without any real action. The PLA Daily then published articles on the front page for three consecutive days calling for unified thinking and unified action. A Beijing scholar said something quite interesting. If implementation is smooth, there is usually no need to keep shouting slogans. The fact that they keep shouting means things have not been unified. What is the crack in this line of defense? The more thorough the purges, the deeper the accumulated resentment. And this machine has overthrown its own leaders before. It brought down Deng Xiaoping. It placed Zhao Ziyang under house arrest until his death. It has a self-repair instinct. When a certain critical point arrives, it will activate that instinct, no matter who the supreme leader is at the time. The third line of defense in China's deep embedding in the global economy. China is the largest trading partner for more than 120 countries and an irreplaceable manufacturing center in the global supply chain. Taking action against China means the economic cost is shared globally. This creates huge resistance to any extreme outside intervention. However, this line of defense is being eroded. Sino-US economic decooling is accelerating. Friend-sharing is reshaping global supply chains. Yet Xi Jinping's own policies are actively weakening it. Wolf warrior diplomacy, the Xinjiang cotton incident, the suppression in Hong Kong. Every one of these has pushed more countries to reassess their dependence on China. Sometimes the moat is dug away by the defender himself. The fourth is information control and social atomization. Today's China, with a great firewall plus a stability maintenance system covering both cities and the countryside, can systematically strangle any spontaneous social movements like the Arab Spring in its infancy. The degree of social atomization in China is far deeper than in any foreign dictatorship. Political trust between people has been systematically destroyed. The social foundation for large-scale spontaneous mobilization almost does not exist. Yet even with such ironclad information control, there are still cracks. The 2022 whitepaper movement was a signal that needs to be taken seriously. From the Urumqi Fire to Urumqi Road in Shanghai to Liangma Bridge in Beijing, a completely unorganized spontaneous movement appeared simultaneously in dozens of cities. The great firewall can block organized information spread, but it cannot block the moment when a certain threshold of personnel interest is broken through. The effectiveness of information control will drop sharply once that threshold is crossed. The fifth is the surveillance system, and it's the deepest crack. This is a weapon that none of the fallen dictators ever possessed. It is also the most fundamental difference between Xi Jinping and all 20th century dictators. Hundreds of millions of cameras, facial recognition, AI algorithms analyzing in real time, every phone payment, every trip record, every internet search leaves a trace. The social credit system pushes punishment into every aspect of daily life. You cannot buy train tickets, cannot buy plane tickets, cannot ride high-speed rail, your children cannot enter good schools, your bank accounts can be frozen. This system also has enormous deterrent power over the elite class. Anti-corruption big data tracks every suspicious fund transfer. Communications monitoring records every sensitive conversation. But this very system has a fatal design flaw. It looks downward, not upward. It monitors ordinary citizens and mid- to low-level officials, but it is almost blind to the operations inside the highest power circle. The forces that have ended the dictators in history have never come from the people in the square. They have come from the meeting rooms of the Politburo Standing Committee, from some persons with enough power and enough motive making that decision in the dark of night. And what happens in that meeting room cannot be monitored by any digital surveillance system, because the people who control that surveillance system are sitting at the same table. Stalin had the world's most powerful secret police and the tightest intelligence system. Yet his final end still came in the silence of those four people closest to him. Not one of those four was monitored by any secret police, because they themselves were the highest commanders of the secret police. This historical logic will not change just because facial recognition AI has been added. Now let's make a short summary at this stage. We have now clearly seen the five lines of defense and the cracks inside each one. So putting all this together, what is the most likely endgame for Xi Jinping? In the next episode, we will break down his six most likely endings one by one, weigh the probabilities and analyze the trigger conditions. Before we begin, I want to leave you with one question. Do you know how Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying crushed again a fall in 1976? It was not by using the regular army. It was not by a vote in the Politburo. They relied on a certain kind of force. And just this January, before handling a major matter, Xi Jinping made a small move. That move bears a striking similarity to the move Ye Jianying made back then. Between these two events lies the most real rule of power transition in the entire history of the Chinese Communist Party. We will unfold that in the next episode. See you then. So thank you so much for watching. If you find this video helpful, please like it, drop a comment below, and hit the subscribe button right here. It really helps YouTube suggest my video to others. I'll be back with more content soon. Until then, be well.