The Internet has been ablaze this month with news and speculation about the grisly death of popular Chinese actor Yu Menglong. The death was pronounced an accident by police who closed the case almost as soon as it was opened.
According to the vlogger Lei (of Lei’s Real Talk), postings about Yu’s death have garnered billions of views. On September 23, 2025, People News reported that “netizens have used every possible means to demand the truth, ‘storming’ comment sections under CCTV news posts and even flooding police phone lines. The phrase ‘storming the tower’ has come to describe netizens’ defiance of censorship, and has gradually expanded in meaning to signify taking great risks to oppose those in power.”
Preventive murder
Citizen journalists seem to have uncovered a torture and murder organized by the son of a Party leader to prevent disclosure of money laundering and other corruption. Lei calls this September 11 death Red China’s “9/11 moment.” She speculates that if Xi Jinping’s Party rivals can harness the popular rage, Xi’s rule could end.
Katherine Hu, another commentator, argues that the whole regime “sits on the edge of a volcano,” with Xi experiencing a string of political setbacks that may culminate in a Nepal-style revolution.
Beijing reacted by “censoring related information, conducting a mass ‘purge’ of accounts, and most recently issuing a Police Bulletin, declaring that multiple ‘rumour-spreading’ cases had been handled and several people arrested.”
Before Yu’s death, the most recent wave of unrest involved mass demonstrations. In April, “Across the country—from Hunan province’s Dao county in central China to Sichuan’s Suining city in the southwest and Inner Mongolia’s Tongliao city to the northeast—hundreds of disgruntled workers” took to the streets “to protest about unpaid wages and to challenge unfair dismissals by factories that were forced to shut due to the U.S. tariffs.”
This matter of back pay comes up almost as often as factory shutdowns: “Workers have taken to the streets demanding back pay and denouncing mass layoffs.”
“Outside an LED light manufacturing plant near Shanghai, thousands of unpaid workers shouted furiously at company managers over wages that haven’t been paid since January.”
“Flexible employment”
Journalists are going to make the connection between tariffs and layoffs, but President Trump was not responsible for paying Chinese wages before the April 2025 tariffs were announced. There’s more going on here than meets the eye.
Massive job losses were also happening before those tariffs:
Since 2021, China’s so-called “flexible employment” has reached more than 200 million people. The actual number is much higher. Flexible employment is synonymous with unstable work and unemployment. According to the Shanghai Finance Bureau, in the first half of 2022, 460,000 companies closed in China, and around 3.1 million self-employed businesses were dissolved. At the same time, China has witnessed a massive wave of closures of small and medium-sized private enterprises—which used to be an important part of social and economic vitality—leading to the loss of many jobs. Simultaneously, companies in various industries, including state-owned enterprises, have also been laying off employees. Faced with such tumult, President Xi has decided that the economy is the sole lifeline of the country’s ruling class. [Emphasis added.]
So how stable is the communist regime? The fourth plenary session of the Central Committee will be held in October 2025, and this will answer the question, at least temporarily, of who’s up and who’s down. Meanwhile, think tanks and sinologists are providing surprisingly little public Kremlinology on the subject, leaving the topic of stability to others to address.
People News reports: “Rumors of internal power struggles at the top of the Chinese Communist Party are intensifying, placing Party leader Xi Jinping in a grave political crisis. According to sources within the system, the situation includes the emergence of civilian ‘grey organizations,’ an alliance of opposing factions within the Party against Xi, and the purge of core figures from Xi’s faction within the military.”
These “grey organizations” are the stirrings of civil society: “groups such as alumni associations, veterans’ clubs, and migrant worker mutual aid groups” that are “drawing serious attention from authorities.”
Factions
The factions inside the Party include “the so-called ‘Princeling’ faction, led by Deng Pufang and Chen Yuan,” which “is calling for a return to Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening-up”; and the Maoists, who are advocating “a return to Cultural Revolution–style policies.”
Will they team up against Xi in October?
A website called The Global Economy rates the political stability of states, including Red China’s. Its evaluation as of 2023 is -0.51 on a scale of -2.5 (weak) to +2.5 (strong). The number represents a measurement of “perceptions of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means….”
“In comparison, the world average is -0.06 points, based on data from 193 countries. Historically, the average for China from 1996 to 2023 is -0.44 points. The minimum value, -0.66 points, was reached in 2010 while the maximum of -0.1 points was recorded in 1996.”
In other words, if a positive number indicates some measure of stability, Red China has not been politically stable for 30 years or longer.
How much more instability can the communists endure without Xi or the Party itself losing power? □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: Nepal Versus the People’s Republic of China
