‘Resign by August 30’: China’s Elite Just Turned on Xi? 48 Hours in Shanghai Decides His Fate

Shanghai, the night of July 15th. While Xi Jinping sat at the center of an AI conference trying to recast himself as a technology-driven leader, elsewhere in the shadows of power, the Communist Party's elder statesmen were quietly opening three blood-soaked ledgers. The collapse of the property sector, a trillion-yuan chip industry reduced to ashes, and electric vehicle graveyards spreading across abandoned fields. Now, a figure Xi Jinping has not dared to touch Deng Pufang, the son of Deng Xiaoping, is reportedly joining forces with the descendants of Liu Shaoqi to deliver a chilling message. Resign before August 30th. Is this the opening act of a silent coup? And why has even Zhu Rongji, a man who has remained silent for the past 20 years, now turned his back on Xi? Deng Pufang and Liu Yuan team up. Is there an August deadline for Xi? According to information obtained through private channels by Shanghai businessman Hu Liren, the Chinese Communist Party's Second Red Generation, the descendants of senior CCP revolutionaries, and its Second Military Generation, the descendants of high-ranking military officers, are now entering a phase of broad, coordinated backlash against Xi Jinping. This resistance is said to have moved beyond verbal discontent and developed into concrete political action. Reports claim that members of the Second Red Generation have formed an alliance led by Deng Pufang, the son of Deng Xiaoping, working alongside several influential figures within the party, including Liu Yuan, the son of Liu Shaoqi, to deliver a political demand to China's top leader with a clear deadline. They are reportedly demanding that Xi Jinping resign before August 30th this year. Why has Deng Pufang emerged as the leading figure? Within the CCP's political lineage, the Deng family represents the ideological legitimacy of China's reform and opening up era. Although Xi Jinping has spent the past several years using various means to marginalize the party elders, he has remained wary of confronting Deng Pufang directly, much like someone afraid to strike a rat for fear of breaking the valuable objects around it. The fundamental reason the Second Red Generation and the Second Military Generation have chosen this moment to risk everything is their own interests. During the first three decades of reform and opening up, these families relied on the extensive resources and networks established by their fathers and grandfathers in the military and local governments to gain control over highly profitable industries such as energy, finance, and real estate. Enriching themselves in the process, there was an unspoken understanding that economic privileges would be tolerated in exchange for political stability. Xi Jinping's decade-long campaign of selective anti-corruption, however, has completely shattered this unwritten arrangement. Countless members of the Second Military Generation have been forced to watch as their family assets were confiscated, their close associates arrested, and they themselves face the prospect of marginalization or even political purging. If corruption is a crime, then who is the most corrupt of all? Hu Liren argues that Xi Jinping's own family is the biggest rat in the system. Some have even alleged that the family has used a range of secret channels to appropriate benefits worth as much as 3 trillion yuan. Whether or not that rumored figure is entirely accurate, the allegation has reportedly become a powerful rallying point within both the military and the Second Red Generation. Members of the Second Military Generation still command extensive resources and personal networks throughout the middle and lower levels of the armed forces. They have come to believe that if Xi is allowed to continue acting without restraint, they may all eventually end up in prison. Hu Liren therefore believes that the internal power struggle within the CCP is now approaching what he calls the critical threshold of civil war. To understand the present rupture between the military and China's top leadership, it is necessary to return to March 2018, a moment that altered the course of Chinese history. At the time, the first session of the 13th National People's Congress was held in Beijing. Its agenda included amending the constitution and abolishing presidential term limits. To ensure that the constitutional amendment passed, military personnel reportedly entered the assembly hall itself. This near-open display of coercive force left the more than 2,000 delegates present with little choice but to obediently vote in favor. In substance, the passage argues, it amounted to a military coup. According to Hu Liren's analysis, the key figure capable of deploying troops into the National People's Congress hall to support Xi Jinping's bid for lifelong rule was Zhang Youxia, who was then serving as vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. Military personnel were allegedly present not only inside the voting venue, but were also deployed in large numbers outside the hall. A powerful figure within the armed forces, Zhang Youxia was both a member of the second military generation and one of Xi Jinping's loyal allies during the early years of Xi's leadership. The cruelty of politics, however, lies in the fact that yesterday's loyal supporter often becomes tomorrow's threat. Zhang Youxia could never have imagined that, after once using military boots to help Xi Jinping trample the law, the poisonous consequences would one day fall upon his own head. Now, the passage claims he has been detained by Xi Jinping. Hu Liren believes that Xi may have assumed that controlling the security forces in Beijing would allow him to control all of China. In reality, however, he is now facing fierce resistance from the entire network of interests associated with the second red generation and the second military generation. This resistance resembles a silent coup advancing step by step toward the August 30th deadline. 48 hours at the Xizhou State Guest Hotel. Can Xi Jinping win over the party elders? From July 15 to July 16, 2026, Xi Jinping attended an artificial intelligence conference at the Xizhou State Guest Hotel in Shanghai. According to Jiang Feng, Xi hoped to use the event as a political trump card to score points, restore his standing, and persuade the public that he still deserved to remain on the throne. But the display was not enough to convince the party elders that he remained capable of leading China. According to Jiang Feng, their cold verdict was simple. Xi Jinping must resign. These veteran Communist Party figures have survived enough political storms to become masters of the system. They do not need to understand artificial intelligence. They only need to understand Xi Jinping. He has been in power for 13 years. That is more than enough time for the party's senior figures to judge a man's abilities. And enough time for state-owned enterprises and local government finances to be devastated by policies personally designed and imposed by him. Most notably, even within the CCP itself, Zhu Rongji had reportedly lost all confidence in Xi as early as a year ago. It is important to remember that Zhu Rongji was never a Western-style free-market reformer. He came from the planned economy system and was responsible for introducing China's tax-sharing system. Few people believed more strongly than he did in the state's ability to concentrate its strength to accomplish major tasks. Moreover, Zhu has been retired for more than 20 years. He is famously tight-lipped and has never publicly commented on serving Chinese leaders. If even he had completely shaken his head in disapproval a year ago, one should consider just how serious that loss of confidence must have been. What then has Xi Jinping turned China's national development strategy into over the past 13 years? The party elders opened three blood-soaked ledgers and placed them before him. What they saw was one staggeringly foolish pileup after another. The first vehicle was real estate. Xi believed the sector was moving too quickly. So he introduced the three red lines, slamming on the brakes while the car was still racing at 120 kilometers per hour. He created no new sources of tax revenue for local governments, left property developers no escape route, and gave no consideration to the financial security of tens of millions of families. The result was a wave of collapsing developers and local governments stripped of their primary source of revenue. Tens of millions of people were left carrying 30-year mortgages while standing in the rain outside unfinished apartment buildings, homes they could not live in but were still required to keep paying for. This, in turn, triggered a nationwide mortgage payment boycott. In effect, it directly destroyed the foundation of household wealth across the country. The second vehicle was the semiconductor industry. Xi ordered the launch of a massive chip manufacturing campaign that resembled the great leap forward era drive to produce steel. Cement traders, property developers, and even pig farmers took over companies overnight, reinvented themselves as semiconductor experts, and began chasing government subsidies. A single project, Wuhan Hongshan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, consumed 12 billion yuan. In the end, even the factory was never completed. Its only ASML lithography machine, still sealed in its shipping crate, was pledged to a bank as collateral. Trillions of yuan were poured into the sector. What remained were fraudsters who pocketed compensation and subsidies, finished factories, and enormous piles of bad debt on the balance sheets of state-owned banks. The third vehicle was the new energy vehicle industry. Once the sector was branded as a project personally championed by the top leader, local governments rushed to build factories and compete for production output. When the cars failed to sell, companies cut prices. Businesses plunged into a price war, bleeding one another dry. When price cuts still failed to generate sales, some companies reportedly created shell firms and bought their own vehicles in order to claim government subsidies. In the end, tens of thousands of brand new cars were abandoned on empty plots of land, forming spectacular electric vehicle graveyards. No one dared to stop production. Halting the factories would have meant admitting that the direction set by the general secretary had been wrong. With these three bad debts laid out on the table, the party elders now see artificial intelligence as merely the fourth vehicle Xi Jinping is preparing to crash. The greater irony is that the technical foundation of artificial intelligence depends on the free flow of information, the integrity of data, and the unrestricted collision of ideas across borders. But what will artificial intelligence face in Xi Jinping's China? Before any large language model can be released online, the first step is not to test its algorithms but to submit it to the cyberspace administration of China for ideological review. These models must first enter the mind, enter the heart, and enter the soul. Above all, they must study Xi Jinping thought. When the human mind has already been forced into silence, how can a computer be expected to become intelligent? This is the recurring pattern of decline shared by every leader-driven project under Xi Jinping's system. Bad news is suppressed while fabricated data is reported upward. Failing projects continue to receive funding while those who are genuinely capable of developing technology and building products are denied resources. Those who are best at shouting slogans, writing flattering reports, and posing for photographs with senior leaders are pushed to the front of the line. Eventually, the entire industry is dragged into price wars, debt, and chronic overcapacity. Xi Jinping himself, meanwhile, is always right. Success is credited to his personal leadership. Failure is blamed on Western suppression or on subordinates who supposedly failed to carry out his instructions correctly. With this style of leadership, can China truly move forward into a new era? Please share your thoughts in the comments. Thank you for watching and see you next time.