How Did Xi Jinping Become a Super Political Strongman? Observations on a Continuous Soft Coup

Xi Jinping's deep-seated Maoist complex and strong sense of mission as a 'Red Second Generation' drive his current 'Red Guard' cabinet to prioritize the consolidation of the communist regime. Consequently, they possess a stronger desire for reform compared to conservative technocrats. While Xi carries out a Maoist 'continuous revolution' through small-scale political movements and party restructuring—radical and expansive with the mass line at its core—he simultaneously inherits Deng Xiaoping's neoliberal economic path and the principle of governing the country according to law. He honors Confucius and restores Confucianism, emphasizing family rules, family instructions, and intra-party regulations, presenting a face of 'neo-traditionalism.' This 'Neo-Maoism,' a hybrid of 'neo-traditionalism' and 'Maoism,' has successfully turned him into a super political strongman!

The 'Chinese Dream,' themed around family-state, filial piety, harmony, and contentment, perfectly dissolves the anger of the Chinese public from another angle, spawning a wave of personality-cult populism that gradually merges into a 'moe-ified' (cute-styled) nationalism in the internet language style. What follows is a series of micro-fascist movements, constituting a continuous soft coup that invisibly eliminates all opponents, leaving no resistance and no dissent.

This is the China we see before our eyes. Will the China of the future change?

This book explores the process and reasons behind the formation of Xi Jinping's strongman system from multiple dimensions—including discourse analysis, the supervision system, local movements, and the relationship between Xi and the systems of Deng Xiaoping and Maoism—against the backdrop of the more than sixty years since the CCP took power in 1949, specifically targeting the political landscape of Xi Jinping and the Xi era since 2015.