Xi Jinping Made His First Domestic Inspection of 2026 Without His Closest Aide

Xi Jinping traveled to the city of Dezhou in Shandong Province on June 24 for his first formal domestic inspection of 2026, and the man usually closest to his side, Cai Qi, was nowhere in the picture. Commentators read the trip, Xi’s first official outing of the year, as an unusual decision to lend his personal endorsement to territory tied to his political rivals, and the oddities around it have fueled speculation about his standing.

According to the Party’s official news agency, Xinhua, Xi inspected local agriculture in Dezhou on June 24, visiting Dongyujia and Xiyujia villages in the Bianlin township area of the city’s Lingcheng District. He was accompanied by one of China’s vice premiers, He Lifeng, along with Shandong’s Party secretary, Lin Wu, and the provincial governor, Zhou Naixiang.

Party media coverage of Xi’s past inspections has long shown that his trips come with heavy security and with crowds, derided as “extras,” whom local officials arrange in advance to see him off and on and to strike poses of attentive listening. The both-hands-overhead clapping at Xiyujia was something new. After the video reached the overseas platform X, it drew a wave of comments: that raising the hands overhead in welcome is North Korea’s highest form of salute, and that Xi had “just gotten back from North Korea and the flavor came through right away.”

One commenter jeered that the scene “still wasn’t up to standard, they should add little hops and wipe away tears.” Others doubted that such inspections reveal anything real, asking what genuine conditions a leader can observe when everything has been arranged beforehand, and dismissing the welcomers as professional actors and suspiciously clean, pale-skinned farmers.

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Commentators say Xi favors the kind of pageantry North Korea staged for him

On June 8 and 9, Xi visited North Korea and received an effusive welcome from its leader, Kim Jong Un.

The U.S.-based independent commentator Cai Shenkun wrote on X that Kim understands exactly the sort of diplomatic spectacle Xi enjoys. Tightly choreographed welcome ceremonies, crowds lining the streets, and flowers and cheering have grown rare in most countries, Cai noted, yet they satisfy Beijing’s expectation of the “highest courtesy.” Kim, in Cai’s account, also knows his arithmetic: a lavish reception costs little but can buy substantial economic aid, energy support, and political backing, a worthwhile trade for a North Korea long under international sanctions.

During the North Korea visit, Cai Qi, the Politburo Standing Committee member who runs the Party’s General Office and also heads its Central Party School, accompanied Xi to tour the Central Cadre School of the Workers’ Party of Korea, North Korea’s equivalent of a central party academy.

In a June 10 post, Cai Shenkun wrote that Cai Qi appeared transformed during that visit, smiling rarely seen at home and acting obsequious and deferential before Kim, nodding along and bowing repeatedly, a sharp departure from the stern, grim figure shown on Chinese state television.

The independent commentator Wu Jianmin wrote on X that Cai Qi, having followed Xi to North Korea and toured its central party school, came away convinced that the North’s party-school indoctrination had been a great success, and that on returning home he began pushing to make Chinese officials more like their North Korean counterparts.

Cai Qi, long regarded as one of Xi’s most important confidants, then conspicuously failed to accompany him to Dezhou, drawing outside attention and speculation.

Cai Qi’s absence from the trip fueled talk of a power crisis

The U.S.-based commentator Tang Jingyuan noted on his online program that, judging by past Party media coverage, Xi normally makes several trips to localities and grassroots sites each year once spring begins. In the first half of 2025, by Tang’s count, Xi made five such inspections.

Xi’s June 24 visit to Dezhou, to a rural area and major grain-producing households, was his first formal grassroots inspection of 2026. As his first official trip of the year, Tang said, it was abnormal in itself, both for how late it came and because Cai Qi, as head of the General Office, was missing from it. Across Xi’s five grassroots inspections in the first half of 2025, Cai Qi accompanied him on the first four and was absent only on the fifth.

That fifth trip was on May 19, 2025, when Xi visited Luoyang in Henan Province, touring the Luoyang Bearing Group, the White Horse Temple, and the Longmen Grottoes. Online rumors at the time held that after the Luoyang stop Xi was unable to return to Beijing and was instead made to remain there for closed-door self-reflection, while an enlarged meeting of the Politburo in the capital discussed whether he would stay or go. On that occasion, the rumors said, Cai Qi stayed in Beijing and only He Lifeng accompanied Xi.

The same arrangement recurred on June 24, with Cai Qi absent from Dezhou and only He Lifeng at Xi’s side. Around the same time, Tang noted, Xinhua and the People’s Daily reported other members of the Party’s top body, the Politburo Standing Committee, including Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, and Han Zheng, taking part in various events, but carried no report of any public activity by Cai Qi, which raised the question of why, if he had nothing else scheduled, he did not travel to Dezhou.

In Tang’s reading, Cai Qi stayed behind to hold Xi’s base in Beijing. Xi, aware of what Tang called a sense of crisis hanging over him, has tried to leave the capital as little as possible this year for fear that any absence could open the way to a challenge, and now that circumstances have forced him to travel, the only person he appears to trust to guard Beijing in his place is Cai Qi. The absence, in Tang’s view, is itself a reflection of Xi’s insecurity. Tang also pointed out that Dezhou is the only city in Shandong included in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei regional development plan and sits about an hour from Beijing by high-speed rail, allowing Xi, as on his March 23 visit to the Xiong’an New Area in Hebei, to travel and return the same day rather than stay overnight.

Xi visited farmland long tied to his rivals

Dezhou is one of China’s leading grain-producing regions, covering about 10,400 square kilometers and producing more than 15 billion jin of grain a year, roughly 7.5 million metric tons, or about 1.1 percent of the national total. It is often described as the country’s first prefecture-level city to surpass both a ton of grain per mu, a Chinese land unit of about a sixth of an acre, and ten billion jin overall.

Xinhua stressed that the theme of Xi’s visit was so-called agricultural and rural modernization. Checking earlier Party media coverage, Tang found that across all the reports of Xi’s grassroots inspections in 2024 and 2025, agricultural and rural modernization appeared as the sole stated theme exactly once: the June 24, 2026, trip to Dezhou. Xi’s previous inspections centered on what he treats as his signature achievements, places and projects branded as “high-tech,” “industrial parks,” “innovation parks,” and “new quality productive forces.” Agriculture and the countryside, mentioned only in passing, had never been his focus.

Another sensitive point, Tang noted, is who has overseen this portfolio. After the Party’s 18th Congress, responsibility for agricultural and rural modernization and for rural policy fell to former vice premier Wang Yang; after the 19th Congress, once Xi had consolidated unchallenged authority, that work passed to then vice premier Hu Chunhua. Both Wang and Hu are among the rivals Xi most wants to keep at arm’s length.

For Xi to make his first trip of 2026 an endorsement of agricultural and rural modernization, on turf long associated with the two men he regards as his chief rivals, runs against what he would normally do.