The 60-Year Cycle Returns: 5 Coffins, Smoke at Mao’s Mausoleum — Is This A Warning Sign For The CCP?

On August 9, Tiananmen Square was packed with tourists in the middle of the summer holiday season. Behind the rows of trees, the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall was undergoing a major renovation project that had begun in March and was scheduled to continue through the end of August. At that very moment, a video began circulating online showing thick black smoke billowing into the air, clearly visible right beside the six golden Chinese characters on the memorial's roof. Most likely, the smoke came from construction equipment or from the nearby landscaped area, as there is no publicly available evidence that the memorial itself suffered any damage. Yet Chinese folk belief operates according to a logic all its own. For many people, the first instinct upon pulling out their phones was not to call the fire department, but to search online for the meaning of black smoke rising from an ancestral grave. There is a well-known old Chinese saying, when someone in a family suddenly rises to high office or strikes it rich, the village elders will say that green smoke is rising from the family's ancestral grave. The key word is green, a symbol of blessings bestowed by one's ancestors from beyond the grave, not a column of ominous black smoke. Coincidentally, just two days earlier in Manila, thousands of kilometers from Beijing, another strangely symbolic scene had unfolded. In the early hours of August 7th, Philippine police received a series of reports about five coffins that had mysteriously been left by roadsides across Manila, Makati, and Quezon City. One was even placed directly outside the Chinese embassy. A bomb disposal team was urgently dispatched. Investigators found no explosives inside the coffins, but their exteriors had been painted with slogans opposing the Chinese Communist Party, along with images of Xi Jinping, Wang Yi, and Ambassador Jing Kuan beside the word greedy. Smoke on one side, coffins on the other, the spiritual symbolism could hardly have been more striking. But the real question is this. Does an officially atheist regime truly place no stock in omens like these? Turn the clock back exactly 50 years to the afternoon of March 8th, 1976. The skies over Jilin suddenly erupted with a tremendous roar as a meteorite shower that would stun the world came crashing down onto Chinese soil. The largest fragment, known as Jilin No. 1, weighed nearly 1.8 metric tons. When news of the event reached Zhongnanhai, Mao Zedong was already in the final months of his life, confined to his wicker chair and gravelly ill. His personal nurse, Meng Jinyun, later recalled that Mao had seemed absent-minded until he heard about the enormous rock falling from the sky, at which point he suddenly became alert. Having spent a lifetime immersed in the 24 histories, Mao was deeply familiar with the traditional idea of Tianren Ganying, the correspondence between heaven and human affairs, and with the strange celestial omens that, throughout Chinese history, were said to herald the death of emperors. The leader who had spent his life urging the people to struggle against heaven and earth and bend nature to human will became strikingly contemplative in his final months. On hearing of the meteorite, he reportedly sighed and uttered a line that would later become famous. When a great stone falls from the sky, it means someone is about to die. What followed in 1976 matched that ominous remark with almost eerie precision. Zhou Enlai died in January. In March came the Jilin meteorite shower. In April, the Tiananmen incident erupted. Zhu De died in July, followed soon afterward by the devastating Tangshan earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Then, in September, Mao Zedong himself died. Less than a month later, the Gang of Four was arrested. The first generation of the Communist Party's ruling elite did not leave the stage in an orderly transition. Within the span of a single year, its entire political order effectively came apart. Even Mao's final birthday, on December 26, 1975, was said to have carried an unsettling omen. A bowl of longevity noodles, prepared by the veteran chef Tian Shuxian, broke apart into short pieces almost as soon as the noodles were lowered into the pot, leaving not a single strand intact. Those present reportedly fell silent in alarm. Seen through the eyes of someone who had lived for more than 80 years, steeped in Chinese culture, it was no longer easy to dismiss such a moment as mere coincidence. The greatest contradiction, however, lies in the way the regime treated Mao's body after his death. In 1956, Mao himself had been the first to sign a proposal advocating cremation, publicly rejecting the elaborate burial practices associated with China's feudal past. Yet 20 years later, the Chinese Communist Party not only declined to cremate him, but chose to preserve his body indefinitely and constructed a monumental memorial for him directly on Beijing's central axis. Under the ancient spatial order described in the Rites of Zhou, the imperial ancestral temple and ritual altar stood on either side of the imperial way, while sovereign power occupied the center. Yet the CCP placed Mao's remains directly on the old Imperial Avenue, once occupied by Zhonghua Gate. Thus a Communist Party that, in theory, rejects the existence of the soul and denies the mandate of heaven ultimately created for its founding leader something resembling an imperial ancestral temple, one arguably more politically potent than those of the dynasties it condemned. It became a place where every new generation of leaders must stand in order to demonstrate its political lineage and legitimacy. That is why, when a column of black smoke appeared beside the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, the site immediately sent a jolt through the public imagination. In their eyes, it looked as though the ancestral tomb of the Chinese Communist Party itself was smoking. That unease becomes even more pronounced when viewed through the lens of the folk belief surrounding the cycle of the Red Horse and Red Goat, the Bingwu Year, or Red Horse, followed by the Dinghui Year, or Red Goat. As far back as the Southern Song Dynasty, the scholar Chai Wang compiled the Bingding Mirror of Admonitions, observing that in each 60-year cycle, the years of Bingwu and Dinghui tended to coincide with wars, upheavals, and major political crises. The most catastrophic example was the Jingkang Disaster of 1126-1127, which brought about the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty. The last Bingwu Year was 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution formally erupted Exactly one 60-year cycle later, we find ourselves once again in a Bingwu Year. Sixty years ago, Mao Zedong launched his campaign to bombard the headquarters, smashing the existing party and state apparatus in order to reclaim political power. Sixty years later, look at the highest military leadership of the Central Military Commission. A body that once had seven members has been hit by purge after purge. Some of its most senior generals, including Zhang Youxia and He Weidong, have fallen victim to political struggles, leaving what was originally the top leadership effectively reduced to Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin. Much has been said about the feng shui of the Huangxi compound once occupied by the PLA General Political Department, particularly the way Beijing's central axis extends northward through the area. But the real feng shui of an armed force does not lie in geography. It lies in how people are selected, promoted, and entrusted with power. Following the military reforms of 2016, the four former general departments— the General Staff Department, General Political Department, General Logistics Department, and General Armaments Department— were abolished and replaced by 15 functional organs directly under the Central Military Commission. Even the name General Political Department disappeared. More than 30 years ago, the road running along that central axis merely divided the General Political Department compound geographically into two halves. Xi Jinping's military reforms went much further. They dismantled the entire four-department system institutionally. And what has been the result? A decade later, the very highest ranks of the Central Military Commission have been engulfed in one of the most sweeping purges seen since the establishment of the regime. So if Xi Jinping were simply better at choosing and managing people, would the military be stable? Would China itself, therefore, be stable? This is why many of us have never fully understood why the ancients attached such importance to feng shui. They understood that no human being can truly control heaven and earth. Why, then, has the Chinese Communist Party always opposed superstition so vehemently? Because revolutionary politics tells the people that humanity can conquer heaven and earth, that man is bound to triumph over heaven. Xi Jinping's fundamental error, therefore, lies in the fact that the system he has served throughout his life is one that has always sought to pit itself against the mandate of heaven. The leader fears death, so the people are made to shout, Long live the leader! The highest ranks fear a coup, so officials are made to proclaim their loyalty. The military fears purges, so it declares, We are the people's own army. Everyone is afraid, and everyone is playing dark games of power and intrigue inside the same black box. This somber picture is not confined to the corridors of power in Beijing. It is also spreading into China's external security environment. The China-Philippines confrontation in the South China Sea has moved beyond diplomatic sparring and is edging closer to the risk of an actual military clash. Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force firing Type 88 anti-ship missiles on Philippine soil during the joint Balikin exercises marked a highly symbolic turning point. Japan, a country that for decades had been extremely cautious about conducting military operations overseas, was now openly projecting firepower toward the South China Sea. China may not yet be completely isolated from the global trading system, but it is confronting something potentially far more dangerous— security isolation. The Philippines, a country that has long had strong incentives to seek access to Chinese markets and investment, is now being pushed firmly toward the U.S.-Japan alliance network. Japan, which once poured enormous resources into supporting China's revival during the early years of reform and opening up, has now, after rare earth pressure and repeated waves of hostile nationalist propaganda, chosen to undertake its largest military expansion since the end of World War II. One link of cooperation after another is breaking apart, and with them, the sense of security is collapsing as well. What the ancients called feng shui, in the end, can be understood as humanity's attempt to find some psychological anchor when the ability to control reality has been lost. If a country is governed by transparent rule of law, then when officials make mistakes, the law provides a mechanism for dealing with them. If the transfer of power follows clear and public rules, people know who comes next without having to speculate endlessly. It is only when everything disappears into the darkness of a black box, when orderly institutions are replaced by constant anxiety, that people begin clinging to every column of smoke and every unusual natural phenomenon in an attempt to decipher the fate of the nation. When people see a building on fire in a calm and confident society, they simply call the fire department. But when public confidence has already collapsed and fear has taken hold, people immediately begin whispering to one another, the dynasty has run out of its mandate. What do you think about these supposed omens? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you for watching, and see you next time.