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Labubu appears to be yet another sign of China’s global success. Figurines of the grinning, pointy-eared elf, marketed by a Chinese company called Pop Mart, are so wildly popular that fans around the world go to great lengths to get their hands on them. Many of them come in “blind boxes,” meaning that the consumer gets to see the contents only after purchase. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua boasted in mid-June that the Labubu craze “signals a broader shift in China’s role on the global stage”: The country is becoming a cultural center.
At home, however, the Chinese Communist Party is working to dampen the enthusiasm. A June article in its main newspaper, the People’s Daily, criticized the “out of control spending” on blind boxes and similar products among minors who are “irrational” in their decisions and called for tighter regulation to prevent such objects from becoming “tools to exploit children’s wallets.”
Blind boxes are but one cultural trend to incur the party’s ire. In recent years, Chinese authorities have gone after video games and K-pop, comedy clubs and Halloween parties, gay and lesbian activists and women’s-rights advocates, tech entrepreneurs and financial advisers. The incessant crackdowns, and the campaigns of censorship or censoriousness, suggest that the Chinese regime is intent on not just eliminating opposition, but also on micromanaging its people’s lifestyles, consumption, and beliefs.
[From the June 2024 issue: The new propaganda war]
That China under Communist rule is not an open society is hardly a surprise. But before Xi Jinping became the country’s leader, the ruling establishment operated with some constraints. Now David Shambaugh, the director of the China-policy program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, describes China’s political environment as “neo-totalitarian,” meaning that the state has taken a heavy hand “across the board and in all aspects of the lives of the nation.”
The turn comes at a moment when many outside the country perceive it to be on a trajectory of ascent toward possible global dominance. A recent op-ed in The New York Times declared that the long-anticipated “Chinese century,” when the center of global power switches from Washington to Beijing, “may already have dawned.” Inside China, however, the country often seems to be not taking over the world so much as sinking into an autocratic abyss. Maybe these trends can coexist, and China can continue rising globally while deepening its domestic repression. But another trajectory seems just as likely—that an oppressive state will curtail China’s vitality and place a hard limit on its global rise.
This past November, in the town of Zhuhai, in southern China, a man named Fan Weiqiu got into his car and plowed into a crowd at a sports center, killing 35 people and injuring 43. Apparently distraught over a divorce settlement, the 62-year-old Fan was found inside the car with severe self-inflicted knife wounds to his neck.
The incident immediately became a political problem. Such a tragedy should never have happened in the happy, harmonious society that Xi claims to have created, free of the violence and divisions that plague other, inferior countries. China’s vast security state quickly got to work making sure it hadn’t: Censors scrubbed videos, articles, and comments about the incident from social-media platforms. Workers at the sports center cleared away the bouquets of flowers that mourning residents had laid there. Police chased off curious visitors. Fan was executed two months later.
Disappearing inconvenient truths has always been a feature of Communist rule in China. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer and the family visit Beijing, and as they pass through Tiananmen Square, they find a plaque that reads On this site, in 1989, nothing happened. But Xi has lately taken his efforts to convince people that they live in a socialist utopia to a new extreme.
The Chinese people are content, the state’s propaganda organs insist, as they feed the public good news and suppress discussion of the country’s many economic and social problems. The result is a surreal environment, where public discourse is ever more detached from everyday life, and the government is ever less responsive to the concerns and difficulties of its people.
At the same time, the state intrudes more and more into daily life. My wife and I have experienced this directly. Over the past year, teams of police have made regular visits to our Beijing apartment—four of them just this month. Officers check our passports and visas while recording the interaction with small video cameras. We have already provided this information to the police, as required by local regulations; these repetitive visits are likely meant simply to intimidate.
The resulting atmosphere is a throwback to an earlier era of Chinese Communist rule, before the economic-modernization program of Deng Xiaoping. In 1978, as party leader, Deng inaugurated liberalizing reforms with a speech calling upon his fellow cadres to “emancipate our minds.” Deng did not intend China to become a free society. He made that clear with the Tiananmen massacre. But his approach did open safe spaces for debate and personal expression, especially in areas perceived as more pragmatic than political, such as the economy. This relative relaxation was crucial to China’s rise, as it helped the country’s leaders formulate policy and stoke entrepreneurship.
Today’s Chinese leadership seems intent on winding these developments backwards. In a speech published earlier this year, Xi said he aimed to “ensure that the entire population is grounded in a shared ideological basis for unity.” Minxin Pei, an expert on Chinese politics at Claremont McKenna College, put a finer point on the Chinese leader’s motivations, suggesting to me that for Xi, “the loss of control over ideology, the loss of control over society” present “the primary threats to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power.”
Xi has been reasserting that control by steadily eliminating safe spaces for expression. He has enforced the study of his own philosophical ideas, known as Xi Jinping Thought, and constrained public debate on national issues. What was politically tolerated just a few years ago no longer is. The artist Gao Zhen, famous for his depictions of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder, was detained last year, and the authorities confiscated several of his works that had been created more than a decade earlier. Censors remove from social media not only criticism and politically sensitive material, but even accounts and posts deemed too pessimistic.
One reason for the suppression may be that China has a good deal of bad news to disappear. Xi’s predecessors could tout the country’s rapid economic progress, but this ready source of political legitimacy has been evaporating, as growth has slowed and jobs are harder to find. Improving China’s economic outlook would likely require more liberalizing reforms. Xi has resisted them, probably because they would weaken his grip on society by expanding the power of a wealthy middle class. China’s leaders “may be fearful of creating a monster they cannot control,” the Yale University economist Stephen Roach told me.
Instead, Chinese propaganda asserts that the economy is fine. Unflattering data and reports by prominent economists vanish from the internet. State media avoid reporting on the cost to Chinese factories of the U.S.-China trade dispute, and when they do acknowledge it, they tend to add a positive spin. Indeed, Cai Qi, a member of the party’s powerful Politburo, has urged officials to “sing loudly” about China’s bright economic prospects.
A chasm has opened, as a result, between the experiences of Chinese citizens and the government’s response. Chinese college graduates struggle to find jobs; the government, rather than reaching for policies to address their predicament, first suspended the release of unemployment statistics for the nation’s young workers in 2023, then rejiggered the method of calculating them to produce a lower figure.
But the Chinese public isn’t so easily fooled. In recent weeks, social-media users expressed nostalgia for the boom times by posting photos and videos of celebrities from the 2000s and commenting on both their fashion and the better opportunities available back then. These posts implicitly criticize the government by puncturing its narrative of economic progress. A recent paper by the scholars Michael Alisky, Martin King Whyte, and Scott Rozelle cited surveys conducted in China in which only 28 percent of respondents said in 2023 that they believed that hard work is always rewarded, compared with an average of 62 percent in polls conducted between 2004 and 2014.
[Timothy McLaughlin: Why Beijing wants Jimmy Lai locked up]
“I really wonder how a state that insists on a narrative that ‘everything is getting better’ and doesn’t want to hear dissenting voices is going to be able to recognize and respond to those types of voices that are going to emerge in Chinese society,” Carl Minzner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.
In October, residents of Shanghai who ventured out in Halloween costumes got a rude surprise: Police hauled them off the streets. Unsanctioned Halloween celebrations were apparently now off-limits. The authorities didn’t offer an explanation. Were they afraid that a reveler would criticize the regime with a satirical disguise, or dress up in a manner offensive to socialist morality? That a Halloween party might morph into a protest? In a politically charged society, nearly anything could appear to be a threat.
Students in the central city of Zhengzhou began taking nighttime bike rides to nearby Kaifeng. Late last year, the outings became a phenomenon as more and more riders joined them; sometimes the cyclists sang the country’s national anthem as they peddled. At first, officials encouraged these jaunts. But then the crowds swelled to the tens of thousands, and the security state got jittery. In mid-November, police shut the bikers down.
If such arbitrary, paranoid behavior sounds familiar, it should, as it’s common in authoritarian states and can contribute to their decline. China has already been through this. During the initial three decades of Communist rule under Mao, China plunged into violence, political paralysis, economic chaos, and a famine that killed tens of millions. Those who challenged Mao or tried to repair the damage were purged.
The Communist Party was able to save itself only after Mao’s death, by opening China to the world in the 1980s and introducing the reforms that sparked its rapid economic growth. Ever since, China has appeared to be a “different” kind of authoritarian regime, one that merged political control with economic vibrancy. The “China model” supposedly furnished an alternative to the West’s democratic capitalism as a pathway to national success.
[Dan Wang: A nation of lawyers confronts China’s engineering state]
Now China appears to be going back to the future. The four decades of reform were “an aberration,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine and the author of China’s Age of Abundance, told me. The Xi era is “a reset,” Wang said, returning China to a system in which the only source of power is political—the Communist Party, which is “exercising control over all sectors and suffocating society.”
Can China continue to ascend economically under these conditions? Some of its new industries, such as electric vehicles and AI, seem to be continuing to thrive. But in other respects, China is following a pattern familiar from the failed autocracies of the past. Shambaugh told me he was reminded of the late Soviet period, noting “the systemic sclerosis inherent in one-man dictatorship, especially the sycophancy and the need to carry out the leader’s directives no matter what they are.” Shambaugh wrote in a 2024 paper that as the Soviet regime felt itself losing control, its raison d’être seemed to become simply staying in power—“rule becomes rule for rule’s sake.” Xi’s “evident insecurities and obsession with maintaining total control,” Shambaugh wrote, are “clear evidence” that the same is happening in China.
That’s not to say that China’s system is on the verge of collapse. Beijing “has an economy and international linkages to fall back on that the Soviet Union never did,” Shambaugh told me. Chinese Communism could simply “atrophy” in place, he said, citing as examples of this trajectory North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.
Could China really become like North Korea or the Soviet Union? Neither outcome is easy to imagine. But neither is the continued progress of a country that can’t allow its citizens to grieve or celebrate.
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