News Analysis

Heading into 2023, Xi Jinping is grappling with one of the most pressing ruling crises from the out-of-control COVID-19 outbreak, while the recent collective deaths of officials and elites have triggered more dissatisfaction with his policies among the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) higher echelons.

In early December last year, without sufficient medical preparation and advanced warning, Xi’s regime suddenly lifted the extreme epidemic restrictions, terminating a three-year-long “Zero-COVID” policy. This severe reverse caused an explosive outbreak with a skyrocketing death toll.

Among those deaths, there are many elderly politicians, officials, as well as top scholars and scientists in various fields, who were the firm defenders of the Communist regime and its ruling base, for example, In the first month of re-opening, two of the most prestigious universities in China, Peking University and Tsinghua University, issued about 200 obituaries of their faculty members and professors.

“This gives Xi’s political opponents the excuses to hold him accountable,” said U.S-based China expert Shi Shan to The Epoch Time on Feb.4.

But the mass death of officials and elites during the COVID outbreak may only be the prelude to the collapse of the rule of Xi and the Communist Party, according to Shi.

Notably, there is a growing body of evidence showing that most of the recently dead officials and elites had received organ transplants during their lifetime. Some even multiple. Most of them had been enjoying lifelong medical privileges.

A typical death case was Gao Zhanxiang, a former vice chairman of the Federation of Literature, who was diagnosed with COVID before his death on Dec. 9, 2022.

The vice-ministerial official had claimed that almost none of the “parts” in his body were his own, meaning that many of his organs were transplanted.

Another case is military writer Xiao Yun, who was infected with COVID in mid-December last year and died at the age of 48 at the end of January. Xiao had undergone a kidney transplant before contracting COVID, according to a Jan. 30 report from Chinese news media NetEase.

Xiao was the author of many books propagandizing for the CCP.

On the day Xiao contracted COVID, he posted on his Weibo of 1.5 million followers, expressing his gratitude to the government as it had “protected me for three years.”

A medical study published on June 2, 2022, in the National Library of Medicine found that organ transplant patients require long-term immunosuppressive agents to suppress organ rejection, but it also greatly reduces the body’s immunity to viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens.

“One of the causes for the CCP’s insistence on the Zero-COVID policy at any cost is to protect these organ-transplant recipients,” said Dr. Xiaoxu Lin, a U.S.-based virologist, said on Elite Forum, a program on The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD. He added that they tend to be more susceptible to infection, and both COVID-19 and the vaccine itself are types of viruses.

China is the biggest human organ bank in the world, and the CCP has long been exposed as organizing organ harvesting crimes at the state level from prisoners, Falun Gong practitioners, and Uyghurs.

Based on official disclosures of the number of cremators in the country, the number of deaths in previous years, and the current workload of visible crematoriums, the Chinese language of The Epoch Times estimated on Jan. 19 that the epidemic killed at least 25 million people in the first month of the Communist Party’s sudden relaxation of COVID restrictions.

“China’s citizens face what could become their country’s largest mass-death event since the Great Leap Forward,” said Ben Lowsen, a specialist in Chinese political and security affairs and advisor to the U.S. Air Force, in Jan. 5 article published in The Diplomat.

The Great Leap Forward, a political movement directly initiated by Mao that claimed to “catch up with Britain and the United States and run into a communist society” during 1958-1961, led to the death of more than 20 million people in a famine.

“In an ominous parallel, Xi’s government today has essentially given up on providing COVID-19 statistics,” said Lowsen.

Over the past three years, the CCP’s harsh zero-COVID approaches have heavily hit China’s economy and shaken the foundations of the Communist Party’s rule.

The economic recession hasn’t happened in the past 30 years or so, “it’s a matter about the end of Chinese Communist reign,” said Shi, metaphorically speaking that the economy under the CCP’s authoritarian system is like an airplane, “once it loses speed, it will collapse.”

In 2022, China’s economic growth rate slid to 3 percent, far below its target of 5.5 percent growth, as reported by official figures. But with the CCP’s consistent falsification of data, the situation could be worse, Shi said.

In addition, local governments’ financial burden has been exacerbated by the protracted lockdown and all-staff nucleic acid testing. But the central government won’t provide any bailouts for local debts, according to Liu Kun, the Minister of Finance, who told Chinese financial media in early January.

Life and livelihood crisis resulting from extreme zero-COVID curbs has also ignited a wave of civil resistance, such as the White Paper movement and the Fireworks Revolution, with protest slogans directed at the CCP regime like “take down the CCP, take down Xi Jinping.”

Xi’s anti-corruption campaign geared toward party dissenters, coupled with highly centralized power after the 20th Party Congress, has pushed him at loggerheads with the CCP bureaucracy.

In a Jan. 29 Elite Forum, commentator Qin Peng said Xi has lost authority within the party after his failures on epidemic prevention and economic and diplomatic issues, which is very dangerous for a CCP dictator.

“But on the other hand, Xi is not willing to lose it [the authority], so this internal struggle will intensify and won’t be over until death,” said Qin.

Some signs showed that Xi is proactively striving to launch a new purge in the party. At a meeting of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) on Jan. 9, Xi said the new CCDI should “push forward the strict governance of the Party at all times.” The same idea was emphasized in a Jan. 31 article in the CCP magazine Qiushi, which said this governance matters to the stability of the CCP’s rule and the fate of its regime.

Li Xi, secretary of the CCDI, said at a Feb. 3 meeting that “we must deeply understand Xi’s political position.” Li is a representative of the Xi faction’s Shaanxi Province circle. Since Xi came to power in 2012, the CCDI has become an important tool for him to purge the party of his political enemies.

According to Shi, Xi has been in the plight of domestic affairs and diplomacy, and his political enemies will spare no effort to attack him in his vulnerable moments. “This is like ‘taking your life while you’re sick,’ and the internal struggle will escalate, and his political opponents will not let him go,

“Xi has no way back in the internal struggle of the party, if one step retreats, he will die without a burial place,” Shi said.

TV producer Li Jun said in the Elite Forum broadcast on Jan. 28 that “Xi will definitely be held accountable within the Communist Party, and his political opponents will find solid evidence to force him out of office.”

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.