HUGE sign! Xi's Father Has His Memorial Renamed

Good morning. I landed just in Korea a few hours ago, and I saw this news. Actually, it's from four days ago, but I thought it'd be very interesting to talk about it now because of what we recently have been talking about in our previous episodes in Elite Politics, which is basically the loss of power from Xi Jinping. So this latest one has to relate to his dad. So a few years ago, they started this memorial called Xi Zhongxun Memorial, which is dedicated to his dad for part of the revolutionary history. But when it opened on the 23rd death anniversary of his father, Xi Zhongxun, it was renamed to Guangzhong Memorial. So they removed his dad's name from it, which is actually very interesting because this is a, I would say, probably one of the most direct evidence that we have so far. Whether or not he still holds the title of General Secretary or whatever the other case may be, the temperature of the Chinese politics is definitely changing. So essentially what happened was on May 24th, so this was what, five days ago now, we saw the memorial open up. But then obviously, if you switch the name from somebody to just a regular name, like Guangzhong basically means a location, then you've removed the political significance from that. Because this whole memorial, the showcase that they're putting on was supposed to be dedicated to his father, but now they added a bunch of other stuff. Because even in history, I remember in the memorial in Beijing for Mao, they even had to put in other people too. Because even then, the level of glorification they can handle, so they put other people in. But in this case, they had to essentially remove a huge portion of his father's so-called historical footprints and add in other people into it. Now, Xi Jinping and his brother, they worked on this for a very long time, and they worked with the local officials in Fuping County. This is in Shanxi, which is the hometown of his father. But the last minute change obviously speaks a lot of volume. Clearly, there's internal opposition to this move, but this also wasn't just a sudden move. This was a few years in the making. They worked with the officials and the opposition is clearly saying that, well, Xi Jinping, the father, is not people like Mao, and he wasn't Zhou Enlai, he wasn't Deng Xiaoping, he wasn't one of the founding revolutionary figures. So that's why when they tried to glorify or to upscale his historical narrative of what he had done for the party, obviously it's impossible to fight it, except when Xi Jinping would have the highest political capital at the time. So when he was so much in power, that's when you could push this idea through. Think of it like this. If any recent US presidents like Trump, Biden, Clinton, Bush, Obama, any one of them tried to start a memorial much bigger than, say, the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, these type of things. So nobody would think they're normal if they tried to overwrite or to try to surpass that of the history or the actual achievements of those two presidents. So that's exactly what happened. Because this place, the memorial, it's a staggering 40,000 mu or 26,000 hectares, which is actually more than four times the size of the Ming Dynasty Xiaolingtong, or the nine times that of the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen's memorial. So that's already speaking volumes of how big they were trying to do this. It actually is much bigger than the one in Tiananmen where Mao is at. So obviously, if you're trying to build something like this, you're going to get a lot of pushbacks. This was done under the supervision of a man named Jing Junhai, who obviously was part of the loyalist faction for him. And this was, again, the overall attempt to try to craft that cult of personality, the personal dynasty. And they're trying to whitewash or even to glorify some of the family history of Xi Jinping, which actually is not that pretty. But today, obviously, everything's backfired. The grandeur is gone. Jing Junhai has been demoted, like many of the other people who were seen a few years ago to be on the rise. They were the hotshots of the time. And now, they've suddenly facing early retirement, or they've been demoted to some random role that doesn't really matter. We've also seen a shift in the soft power propaganda as well. This comes in the form of narrative control media. So there was a series on TV in China called Northwest Years, which is supposed to glorify the achievements of Xi Jinping once again. Except it aired a few episodes and then suddenly, nothing. There's no promotion for it. There's not even enough reviews for the episodes on Chinese reviews websites. There's no love from official state media. And for them to change the name on the day of the 23rd death anniversary, it really is something interesting. How deliberate things are when it comes to propaganda in China. This type of stuff is calculated. This is not something that they just ignored because it aired at the wrong time or that they didn't get the notice via email or something like that. They're simply saying that this man right now, the father, is not someone they want to elevate. Why? Well, it's simple. The son's even having issues. So why would we try to elevate the father? So it's a short video today. I'm on the go, but I'll be traveling to Taiwan and we'll be bringing you lots of great videos there. If you want to support us, consider checking out the donation link in the description and support our journey in Taiwan or support our upcoming Singapore trip and hope you find it important that we're covering this stuff. So let me know your thoughts in the comments, subscribe to our channel if you haven't already, and of course, like this video. Alright, until next time. Bye-bye.