Clouds over Celestial Empire. Why China's anti-lockdown protests are escalating into political demands for Xi’s resignation

Xi also stood out from the Shanghai – Youth League dichotomy, with his appointment being a compromise between the two cliques. Coming from a respected political family, he belonged to the group of “red princes”. The “princes” are less of a faction and more of an umbrella designation for a cohort of wealthy establishment heirs. Xi made extremely good use of his extra-factional position, setting out to form a faction of his own: the “Xi Jinping gang”.

In the meantime, Xi began to eliminate competition early on, organizing campaigns against both major cliques. In his crackdown on competitors, Xi leveraged an anti-corruption agenda, and with good reason, because the tenure of Hu Jintao, Xi's predecessor, was marked by a soaring corruption level, reaching an all-time high by 2010, according to some estimates. In many ways, Xi was lucky with the timing, as the domestic situation provided him with a mandate to “sweep” the party clean. However, some analysts, such as Yan Li, a prominent Hong Kong journalist, believe that the anti-corruption campaigns were partly motivated by Xi's somewhat fanatical devotion to his own notion of party purity and that he both played the part of a novice dictator and was a natural product of Chinese institutions and ideology.

Xi offered the positions vacated by his competitors to loyalists from his new “gang”, both in the central bodies and at the provincial level. He also formalized an instrument of his direct control over legislative and development-related initiatives. Xi expanded the role of the so-called “Leading Groups” – advisory bodies within the CCP’s Central Committee - and personally headed nine of them. Under Xi, these groups have become an alternative to Deng Xiaoping's collective leadership concept and have enabled him to retain personal control over the majority of initiatives.

In parallel with the reform and the sweep of central power structures, Xi Jinping was actively suppressing popular protest sentiments. In addition to tightening censorship, introducing the social credit system, and persecuting religious and ethnic minorities, all of which analysts have compared to Maoist nationalism, Xi also sought to suppress grassroots leftist and labor movements, including Maoist associations and circles.

Thus, protests at the Jasic welding equipment factory in Huizhou ended in mass layoffs and arrests. Workers attempted to form a union to protest against poor working conditions and low, delayed pay. News of the workers' struggle and obstacles to union formation spread quickly through mass media and social networks, with students, members of independent leftist organizations, and neo-Maoists joining the protests. Around the same time, major social media accounts and chats appeared, and students began to spread the hashtag #epochpioneer. In the first few days, the authorities arrested 50 students and other protesters. Their further whereabouts are unknown. It is assumed that they, like the leaders of the movement and the account administrators, ended up in “re-education camps”.