Xi’s Three Stages: Power Grab, Grand Dreams, Total Unrestraint | Digging into China

Xi Jinping’s 13 years in power divide into three stages: power seizure (2013–2017), grand ambitions unleashed (2017–2022), and total unrestraint (2022–present).
The first stage hid ambition behind reformist appearances—free-trade zones, market rhetoric, Qingfeng buns—while Xi consolidated control through targeted anti-corruption purges and powerful leading small groups that stripped authority from the State Council.
Once secure, restraint vanished. The second stage delivered “common prosperity,” three red lines, double reduction, zero-COVID, and internal circulation—policies that hammered private enterprise, real estate, education, and entertainment, nearly all later collapsing or reversing.
In the third stage, with opposition gone, Xi intensified whim-driven intervention: massive subsidies for “new quality productive forces,” export dumping, deflation. Diplomacy turned wolf-warrior; speech controls became suffocating.
Xi excels at internal power struggles but fails disastrously at governing. His unchecked rule has brought unprecedented economic slowdown and hardship for ordinary Chinese people—and a fourth term approaches.

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