By Li Muzi
Highways cleared, navigation disabled
In the days following reports that Xi Jinping ordered the arrest of Zhang Youxia—Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission (the Chinese Communist Party’s supreme military authority)—and Liu Zhenli, Chief of the PLA Joint Staff Department, Beijing has entered what many residents describe as an abnormal state of tension.
According to multiple eyewitness accounts and videos shared on Chinese social media, major highways leading into Beijing were suddenly placed under control on Jan. 25. Vehicles were ordered off expressways without explanation. At the same time, widely used navigation apps reportedly lost all traffic-condition data and speed-limit alerts, leaving drivers effectively blind.
One widely shared Douyin video features a man who left Tangshan, Hebei Province, at 6:30 a.m., heading toward Beijing via the Beijing–Harbin Expressway. “I was shaking,” he says. “In all my years of driving, I’ve never seen a situation where every vehicle was ordered off the highway.”
Moments after entering the expressway, his navigation system went blank. “No traffic status, no speed warnings—nothing. That made it even more frightening. I didn’t dare press the accelerator.”
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Shortly afterward, a roadside electronic display lit up, scrolling the same message repeatedly in glaring red text: “All vehicles must leave the highway immediately.” The sheer size of the characters, he recalls, was unnerving. He and his passenger stared at each other in disbelief.
When they pulled over to assess the situation, the anomaly became unmistakable: the Beijing-bound lanes ahead were completely empty, while traffic on the opposite side flowed normally. “It didn’t feel like an accident or routine maintenance,” he says. “Something was very wrong.”
After stopping on the emergency shoulder and searching online—without finding any official notice—he cautiously continued for several kilometers until reaching a service-area exit. The rest stop was eerily deserted, staffed by only a handful of workers. When asked what was happening, staff told him the highway ahead was under temporary control for undisclosed reasons and that vehicles were required to turn back or exit immediately.
The driver ultimately abandoned his trip to Beijing and detoured via national roads. “The whole journey was nerve-racking,” he says. “Even now, when I think about that empty stretch of highway, my heart still pounds.”
Military compounds sealed, transit disrupted
Other videos posted the same day claimed that military compounds across multiple PLA theater commands had been sealed off. Some posts asserted that activity had already begun in regions such as Xinjiang and Sichuan. Additional claims—unverified but widely shared—suggested that more than half of Beijing’s subway lines were suspended and that armed special police were deployed on patrol with live ammunition.
While none of these measures were acknowledged by state media, the sheer volume and consistency of the reports have amplified public anxiety.
‘No entry—it’s all military vehicles’
On Jan. 26, further videos showed long columns of military vehicles traveling in formation toward Beijing. In one clip, a civilian driver parked by the roadside mutters bitterly to himself: “Trying to get on the highway? Forget it—it’s nothing but military vehicles.”
Another post, dripping with cynicism, asks whether the convoys are racing to Beijing to defend Xi Jinping—or mounting a desperate march to “rescue Marshal Zhang Youxia.” The author adds that he has no faith left in the People’s Liberation Army, deriding it as “all show and no substance” and mocking the force for collapsing the moment its top commander was seized.
Cryptic WeChat videos signal ‘something big’
Adding to the unease, a wave of short, cryptic videos has appeared on WeChat since Zhang Youxia’s reported detention. The X account “Xi Brain Era,” which reposted several clips, noted that these videos are strikingly similar in style: extremely brief, devoid of context, and laden with ominous hints that “something major” is imminent.
“What does this mean?” the account asked pointedly. “A decapitation operation?”
In one clip, a young man wearing a mask and sunglasses announces: “The organization has dispatched personnel under the codename ‘Youth’ to the East China 06 zone to carry out the ‘Cicada Capture’ plan. Please take note.” In another, a similarly disguised speaker claims to have received a “system notification” warning of “mysterious activity” in a designated zone and urges preparation for immediate deployment.
The videos offer no verifiable details. Their impact lies not in what they prove, but in what they imply—and in the fact that such material is spreading at all under China’s normally suffocating information controls.
Commentary: from high-pressure stability to high-risk breakdown
Political commentator “New High Ground” argues that the simultaneous downfall of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli marks a decisive—and extraordinarily dangerous—shift in CCP internal power struggles. What once took the form of anti-corruption purges against “peripheral” officers has now struck directly at the regime’s inner sanctum: so-called “red second generation” elites and their entrenched family networks.
Zhang’s arrest, the commentator writes, is not another chapter in a triumphant anti-graft campaign. It is the funeral bell for the CCP’s internal “red consensus”—the shared understanding that revolutionary lineage once guaranteed a measure of security. What it signals is not greater control, but a slide from enforced stability into a state of high-risk loss of control.
A recent article by Fu Longshan, published by Kan Zhongguo (Vision Times), reaches a similarly stark conclusion. Zhang Youxia’s fall, it notes, removes the last PLA commander who combined elite revolutionary pedigree with genuine combat authority. Regardless of how official media frame the event, the psychological shock to mid-level officers is profound. It confirms a brutal reality: within the CCP system, no rank is high enough, no loyalty sufficient, to escape eventual purge.
The article further warns that the regime’s turn toward ever more extreme political control will inevitably hollow out the military’s combat capacity and adaptability. The result is a force that appears rigid and powerful on the surface but is structurally brittle. Once economic decline undermines the massive funding required for internal repression, long-suppressed grievances within the ranks could erupt suddenly, triggering cascading breakdowns.