As Xi Jinping was preparing to take the helm of the Chinese Communist Party a decade ago, a great number of China’s political, business and intellectual elites were hopeful that he would make their country more open, just and prosperous.
They included a professor at the party’s top academy who helped train thousands of high-ranking cadres. An economist who would win China’s top economics prize for 2012. A young historian planning to teach a class about contemporary Chinese history, including sensitive periods like the Cultural Revolution.
Mr. Xi’s speech at the opening of the 20th party congress on Sunday made it clearer than ever that China is moving in the opposite direction from liberalization. Obsessed with national security, he is more focused on quashing all ideological and geopolitical challenges than on reform and opening up, the policies that brought China out of poverty.
He used the term “new era” 39 times in his speech, boasting of the party’s achievements under his leadership. But for some Chinese, it has been a dark era — a shift away from a system that, while authoritarian, tolerated private enterprise and some diversity in public opinion to one that now espouses a single ideology and a single leader.
The former professor at the Central Party School, Cai Xia, urged the United States and the world to see China as she sees it: as a totalitarian state that rules with “terror and ideology,” referring to a well-known political theory.
“It’s been an era of moving backward,” she said after watching Mr. Xi’s speech. “It was a decade that was marked by economic retrogression and ideological struggles.”
Ms. Cai has been expelled from the party for such criticism. The historian, Sun Peidong, can no longer teach or publish freely. Xu Chenggang, the economist, is disappointed that the party again controls everything, including the private sector.
All three are living in the United States.
They all believe that China, with its vast surveillance systems and punitive social control, now resembles Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. In their view, even Russia and Iran have more space for dissent.
It’s a view whispered at dinner tables and in chat groups. One online nickname refers to China as “the North Korea to the west.”
Many Chinese people were surprised to learn that before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russians had access to Twitter and Facebook, and that there were several independent Russian media outlets. Beijing has nearly absolute control over what information Chinese people can see and what they can say online.
Last month, Chinese internet users were astonished as protesters in Iran chanted “Death to the dictator” in antigovernment demonstrations, spurred by the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody for allegedly breaking the country’s strict rules on how women can dress. They found it remarkable that the Iranian president had called the victim’s father to offer condolences.
Some people contrasted that with China’s handling of a bus accident, a few days before Ms. Amini’s death, that killed at least 27 passengers who were being transferred to a Covid quarantine facility. The crash led to widespread online protests against China’s harsh pandemic policy. But they didn’t make much of a difference: Only a vice mayor apologized.
The government never released the victims’ names. The episode ended like many other tragedies in China these days: with truth hidden and forgotten.
“Totalitarianism is a virus of humanity. It’s a cancer,” said Ms. Sun, the historian.
A party insider
Ms. Cai was born in 1952 to a revolutionary military family, a so-called red offspring. For years, she counseled China’s top leadership on how to make the party system stronger.
When Mr. Xi came to power in 2012, Ms. Cai believed that the party would embark on a path of reform. But Mr. Xi soon began going after journalists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and nongovernmental organizations.
Four years later, she had her first major break with the party. She was incensed that the propaganda apparatus had launched a ferocious campaign against Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real estate tycoon and a party member, who derided Mr. Xi’s demand for absolute loyalty from the Chinese news media.
“Cracking down on different opinions will bring severe dangers to the party,” she wrote in an essay widely quoted in news reports. She was summoned in for talks and was asked to write letters confessing her mistakes.
When Mr. Xi changed China’s Constitution in 2018 so he could serve more than two terms as president, Ms. Cai lost hope. “I realized that the party wasn’t able to change,” she said. “If the party couldn’t change, the country wouldn’t be able to change.”
She was visiting the United States in 2020 when the pandemic hit. Like many Chinese people, she was dismayed that the party had tried to hide the first coronavirus outbreak, in the city of Wuhan.
In an online hangout with friends back in China, she criticized the party as a “political zombie” and Mr. Xi as a “mafia ringleader.”
“It would end very badly when this country was led by a person like him,” she recalled of her thinking at the time. “I felt that we couldn’t let this go on. We must consider replacing him with someone else.”
A recording of her talk was leaked and went viral. Shortly afterward, she was expelled from the party and stripped of her retirement benefits.
Now, in exile in the United States, she is one of Mr. Xi’s sharpest critics. Last month, she published a long essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, “The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future.”
A market advocate
In 2012, Mr. Xu, the economist, published “The Fundamental Institutions of China’s Reforms and Development,” a paper that would win the top Chinese economics prize. Lou Jiwei, Mr. Xi’s first finance minister, was also a winner that year, for a paper on expanding economic reform.
For decades, Mr. Xu, a Harvard-trained economist, had been deeply involved in debates about how to reform China economically and politically so the system could provide better protections for property and individual rights.
He knew from an early age the importance of such rights. His father, a prominent physicist and a philosopher, was purged in 1958, when Mr. Xu was 7 years old. He remembers being hungry after that, and his mother crying all day long.
At 17, he moved to a farm near the Soviet border, where he spent nearly a decade. For six of those years, he was persecuted as a counterrevolutionary.
After the death of Mao, China’s totalitarian system loosened up, allowing in some private enterprise and nongovernmental organizations. That’s gone now, Mr. Xu said, and the party is in charge of everything. Businesses have been under attack, and entrepreneurs are no longer sure if they really control their companies.
“A totalitarian state doesn’t need to take away ownership,” he said. “It only needs to force you to do what it wants you to do.”
Although the majority of Mr. Xu’s work dealt with mainland China, he was based in Hong Kong. After that city’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 2019, Mr. Xu moved to London, believing that China would no longer allow the freedom of speech in Hong Kong that he needed to do his work.
Last month, he joined Stanford University as a researcher. He’s writing a book on totalitarianism.
A historian who wants history remembered
Ms. Sun, 46, belongs to the generation that benefited most from China’s opening up. She came of age when the country’s economy was taking off and international exchanges were encouraged. After getting her Ph.D. in sociology from Sciences Po Paris in 2007, she was eager to go back to China, which she considered a land of hope and opportunity.
She started teaching contemporary Chinese history at Fudan University in Shanghai in 2013. For two years, she had no problems from the authorities, even though she taught one of few classes in China about the Cultural Revolution. She wanted the Chinese people to remember that tumultuous period.
Things started to change in 2015. Several of her articles about the era were rejected by Chinese academic journals. In 2018, after spending two years in the United States, she went back to Fudan, to a changed country and a changed classroom.
She found that class discussions had become less candid, and she said so on the social media platform Weibo. One morning, she found her office door plastered with printouts of her social media posts, along with threats to post them in other places on campus.
Some of her students reported her to the university authorities. They attacked her on social media. Nationalistic bloggers flocked to the comment sections of her Weibo account, cursing her.
In 2019, when some Fudan students protested the university’s decision to rewrite its charter to emphasize party loyalty over values like independence and academic freedom, Ms. Sun spoke up. She criticized the university’s decision in interviews with foreign media, including The New York Times.
The party secretary of her department repeatedly asked her to write self-criticism letters. She declined.
Ms. Sun, now an associate professor of history at Cornell University, said she still had nightmares about her experience. “The teeth of totalitarianism were inching toward me,” she said in an interview. “If I still wanted to do the kind of research I liked, I would have to leave China.”
