Xi Isolated: Signals of ‘Rebellion’ at Beidaihe, Liu Yuan’s Bold Move!

At a private dinner during the party's most secretive summer retreat, a senior leader raised his glass, praised Xi's golden era. Then, in the same breath, invoked the ghost of Emperor Kangxi, who waited too long to name an heir and left China with a bloody succession war. And from Beijing to Bangkok to the Pentagon, the walls seemed to be closing in all at once. Today, let's go inside the whispers from Beidaihe, the fractures inside Xi's inner circle. And a rapidly shifting world stage that may be leaving China more isolated than at any point in decades. CCP officials scatter as death knell sounds for Xi's absolute rule. Chinese state media says the main agenda of this plenum is to study comprehensive and strict party governance, along with reviewing the current economic situation and laying out economic work for the second half of the year. But outside observers largely believe the real focus of the meeting is something else entirely— the CCP's own internal power struggle. A Vision Times reporter sat down with Professor Yuan Hongbing, a well-known legal scholar based in Australia who regularly shares information said to come from inside the top ranks of CCP leadership. Yuan's take? Before the 21st Party Congress, Xi Jinping had exactly one political concern— how to guarantee he can stay in power at the 21st Congress and fulfill his ambition of ruling for life. Right now, he's facing a genuine political crisis. The CCP has announced that the main content of the fourth— sorry, the fifth plenum of the 20th Central Committee is about studying how to govern the party with strict discipline. In plain terms, that means Xi is about to launch even harsher purges and rectification campaigns, using fear to suppress the hatred building against him inside the party, all so he can secure lifetime rule at the 21st Congress. Xi's increasingly erratic, delusional behavior, moving against the tide of history, has plunged him into a political crisis condemned by hundreds of millions of Chinese people. He's now in a position where, as the saying goes, friends have turned against him and even his closest allies have drifted away. From millions of unemployed migrant workers and recent college graduates, to officials at every level, to the more than 8 million officials purged during Xi's decade in power, plus over 30 million of their family members— all of them now see Xi as a tyrant in the mold of history's worst rulers, a shared enemy of the entire nation, someone who combines cruelty with delusion. At this point, he can only rely on a massive secret police apparatus to maintain a Stasi-style rule, while pushing purges and rectification campaigns to increasingly frantic extremes. Since the 20th Party Congress in 2022, a wave of major political cases involving members of what's called Xi's own faction, people he personally groomed and promoted, has kept erupting across the party, government, and military systems, one after another, seemingly impossible to contain. Li and others, men once considered Xi's most trusted lieutenants and enforcers, have shown anything but absolute loyalty. Quite the opposite. Signs of rebellion all around. The root of all this is that after taking power, Xi tried to emulate Mao Zedong, turning what had been a system of collective rule among the party's elite families into his own personal, absolute dictatorship. That put him not just at odds with the public, but in direct conflict with tens of millions of CCP officials themselves. Yuan cites a source he describes as a person of conscience within the CCP system, who claims that Zhang Youxia, after a few drinks, once told close associates, I stand seven feet tall as a man. How could I ever kneel before a foolish pig? For a dictator like Xi, power is everything. Lose power and you lose everything. He'd revert to being nothing more than that foolish pig left for others to carve up. That's exactly why Xi's only real political anxiety right now is how to secure lifetime rule at the 21st Party Congress in 2027. To that end, Xi has pushed state terrorism to an extreme. Beyond maintaining blanket political pressure on society, he's using sweeping purges and rectification as his main tool to intimidate the tens of millions of officials across the party, government, and military. Liu Yuan Read 2nd Generation Unite Against Xi Yuan also notes that for a long time, there's been a group nicknamed the Zhongnanhai Fortune Tellers. People constantly spinning up political rumors, like claims that party elders would stage a coup against Xi at the Beidaihe Conclave. But he says some of what circulates does come from genuine insiders. Read 2nd Generation families like Liu Yuan, Hu Diping, and Deng Pufang. Who are deliberately trying to build public opposition to Xi and block his path to a fourth term at the 21st Congress. They aim to spread through word of mouth and informal discussion across official, academic, business, military, and public circles allegations that Xi Jinping betrayed reform and opening up, harmed the country and its people, and ruled with brutality and ignorance. The goal is to foster a nationwide political discourse condemning Xi that exists alongside, and in direct opposition to, the official domestic propaganda system under his control. According to a recent live stream from overseas media figure Du Wen, at a dinner in Beidaihe, a Politburo Standing Committee member set to retire next year raised a toast, first praising Xi for ushering in a golden age, comparable to the Kangxi Qianlong era, then shifting tone. Toward the end of his reign, Emperor Kangxi hesitated too long on naming an heir, and it ended in the infamous succession struggle among his nine sons. Next year is the 21st Congress, he said. It's time to start thinking about succession. The room reportedly went dead silent. Faced with this thinly veiled pressure, Xi's only reply was, Within our existing political arrangements, there is always a corresponding plan for succession. Du Wen believes this Standing Committee member was most likely Zhao Leji, effectively pushing Xi to commit to a timetable to set his own expiration date on power. Speaking this bluntly, to Xi's face, Zhao almost certainly has backing from others. Coincidentally, in the past few days, a story out of Hainan has echoed the 2015 Tianjin port disaster. According to posts circulating on Xiaohongshu, at Xiying Port in Haikou, a shipper allegedly packaged tens of tons of strong oxidizers, flammable liquids, and highly toxic chemicals disguised as sanitary pads and household goods to smuggle them through the port. Frontline port staff who flagged the issue and reported it were instead reprimanded and suppressed by their superiors. The person who leaked the story reportedly warned, fearfully, that if this shipment were to go wrong, the blast radius could reach half a kilometer, a Tianjin-style tragedy waiting to happen again. The August 12, 2015 Tianjin port explosion has always carried heavy political undertones. At the time, Hong Kong media and VOA cited sources suggesting the incident was aimed politically at Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan. Xi reportedly convened his inner circle immediately to investigate whether there was a political motive behind it, with suspicion falling on former subordinates of Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiang, both of whom had already been purged. Yuan continues, a major internal shake-up within the CCP system can absolutely tear a crack in the iron curtain of Xi's dictatorship, and a broader popular resistance movement could rise up through that opening. But for public resistance to turn into a democratic movement capable of actually bringing down CCP rule, it still needs the resolve of a genuine democratic revolution to lead the way. The lessons of the nationwide protest movement of 1989 still stand, weighed down by reformist thinking and shaped by the western left's notion, treated as politically correct, of peace, rationality, non-violence, that movement ultimately turned into an uprising on its knees. History may remember more and more clearly one particular tragedy from that time. Three brave individuals, ahead of their era, who threw ink at the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, were seized by the student protesters' own security squad and handed straight over to the CCP police. Afterward, the overseas pro-democracy movement was largely captured by the same reformist thinking, gradually becoming a kind of house servant to western left-wing political forces, ideologically subordinate to them, helping the western left justify over 20 years of appeasement towards CCP tyranny. U.S. reshapes Middle East, Thailand turns on Beijing, China encircled. Xi Jinping's troubles aren't just internal. A well-known figure on X, Mario Naur, argues that Trump is building an entirely new regional order in the Middle East. Turkey, Syria, and Iraq are being positioned as the new pillars of stability, forming a ring around Iran. Iran, in this view, has only two paths left. Join this new structure, or be isolated and lose control over the trade routes running through the Middle East. Naur says Trump is pursuing this through two moves. First, building new energy corridors, pipelines running through Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, to cut reliance on the Strait of Hormuz. Second, weakening Iran's axis of resistance, both financially and politically. Longer term, regional powers in the Middle East will shoulder more responsibility themselves, while the U.S. shifts from a permanently stationed presence to a guarantor of last resort, scaling back its investment in the region. That, in turn, means America's strategic focus pivots toward Asia. Just as Iran appears ready to make concessions, multiple outlets have confirmed that Deputy Defense Secretary for Policy, Elbridge Colby, is leading the drafting of an entirely new nuclear weapons strategy. Its core idea is simple. In the event of conflict with China or Russia, the U.S. would significantly expand its readiness to use short-range tactical nuclear weapons, rather than relying solely on long-range strategic missiles. Beijing has reportedly been counting on the fact that U.S. conventional artillery stockpiles are running low, stretched thin by support for Ukraine and Israel. Now the Pentagon is saying, in effect, it doesn't matter if conventional ammunition falls short. The U.S. president already has a range of tactical nuclear options ready to go. That effectively puts a warning label on any Chinese ambition for a quick move on Taiwan. Thailand, one of China's closest little brothers in the region, has apparently reached its limit and is about to turn against Beijing. The phrase, China and Thailand are one family, has been repeated for decades. But on August 5th, Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak took the rare step of publicly calling out the Suvarnabhumi airport controversy, naming China's ambassador to Thailand directly. He put it bluntly, Incidents like this have happened far too many times already. Veteran Thai journalist Pavan Chachavalpampun went further, saying Beijing always assumes such criticism is being orchestrated by the U.S. behind the scenes. But the truth is that much of the frustration with China's arrogance and heavy-handedness is genuinely grassroots, spontaneous, and coming from many different directions. Many of the people speaking out publicly are themselves ethnic Chinese Thais. This is a spontaneous wave of public anger, one so large that even Pavan says he's never seen anything like it before. Some online observers have also noticed a Thai Facebook page dedicated to criticizing the Chinese Communist Party that's only three months old and has already amassed nearly 100,000 followers. Around the same time, Japan's Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi issued an unprecedented warning. We cannot rule out the possibility of a serious situation emerging in East Asia that could shake the post-war international order. China's neighbors, it seems, are picking up on something unusual in the air. What do you think lies ahead for Xi Jinping? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks for watching. See you next time.