The Big Picture
As Xi Jinping marked his 73rd birthday with a national conference to discuss his own thought, our two most exclusive stories this week were on the government’s silencing, or attempted silencing, of ordinary Chinese. That is the core work of our network: sourcing and reporting stories about real Chinese life that otherwise go untold. Especially the stories that the state is trying to suppress.
I. The Case of Xiao Luoxi
First the background. In November 2025, a five-month-old girl, Xiao Luoxi (小洛熙), was admitted to a Ningbo hospital for what the family was told was a routine check. She was diagnosed with a heart defect, operated on by the head of cardiothoracic surgery, and died hours later of heart and respiratory failure. In February 2026 a municipal investigation ruled it a grade-one medical accident — the most serious category — finding the child’s actual condition was mild with “no clear surgical indication.” The surgeon’s license was revoked; the hospital’s Party secretary and president were disciplined; police opened a criminal case. The parents signed the findings but kept asking for the rest: the full record, the surveillance video. The truth.
That is the part the state could manage. This week was about the part it couldn’t.
On June 15, Xiao Luoxi’s mother, Deng Rongrong (邓蓉蓉), her father, Xu Chunbiao (许春彪), and her grandmother were summoned by the local police to “drink tea” — the standard euphemism for an interrogation. Before going in, Deng recorded a video: “If we don’t report that we’re safe, it means we couldn’t get out.” She had, by some accounts, written a will. That night the grandmother posted that she had lost contact with both parents. A separate clip showed unidentified men prying open the family’s front door while relatives were at the station. By the next day, June 16, the Weibo topic “Xiao Luoxi” was blocked.
The response was extraordinary. From June 17, people across the country began routing around the censorship in relays to keep the family’s name visible — “billions lifting them up; count me in,” ran one line. A Douyin influencer with more than three million followers, Lei Leiyang (雷雷扬), flew to Ningbo to stand with the parents; though she disclosed no itinerary, plainclothes officers intercepted her the moment she landed. She posted again to say she had been reported to her employer for “taking part in the Ningbo Xiao Luoxi affair.” Douyin disabled comments on that video too.
Western newsrooms covered the original death last winter. But the escalation this week — the summons, the silence, the influencer pulled off a jetbridge, the nationwide effort to keep one dead baby’s name in circulation — went unreported.
The mothers who organized online called themselves the “electronic mothers” (电子妈妈).
II. Wuhan’s Toxic Week
Around Gongzheng Road in Wuhan’s Wuchang district, residents spent the better part of the week protesting a facility with a bureaucratic name and an alarming address: the Central China Regional Hazardous Waste Environmental Risk Prevention and Control Technology Center, a ¥205 million toxics lab to be built, by the residents’ account, roughly 27 meters (about 90 feet) from an apartment block, in the dense core inside the city’s First Ring. The developer is not a private firm but a provincial government body, the Hubei Academy of Ecological and Environmental Sciences. The lab would handle hazardous-waste identification and toxicology experiments, with emissions that could include toluene, methanol, dichloromethane, hydrogen chloride and nitrogen oxides. Residents charged that the project had skirted the mandatory social-stability risk assessment and downplayed its hazards; they noted that other regional centers of its kind — in Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shenyang, Xi’an — are in suburbs, not downtowns.
Crowds gathered nightly from around June 10. On the night of June 12, large numbers of police massed at the site; there were scuffles, residents knocked down, at least one person carried off by ambulance. The protesters sang the national anthem at the officers. Posts and videos were scrubbed across Weibo, Douyin and Xiaohongshu until the story was effectively unsearchable.
That scrub worked: there has been almost no coverage of the Gongzheng Road protest at all beyond a single Radio Free Asia report in Chinese. It is worth holding that against Wuhan’s own recent history — and not only its celebrated connection to Covid. When the city’s residents rose against a waste incinerator in 2019, Radio Free Asia‘s English service, the South China Morning Post and The Diplomat all covered it, and the government paused the project. The template — middle-class homeowners, a procedural grievance about a skipped environmental review, a quick climbdown — is a recognized genre of Chinese protest, going back to the paraxylene-plant demonstrations in Xiamen in 2007 and Dalian in 2011. What’s different is how completely the protest can now be made to vanish.
Chinese citizens singing their national anthem while facing down police happened last week as well, as we reported, 900 kilometers away in Chongqing. The causes of the protests were entirely different: the torture of animals in Chongqing, toxic substances in Wuhan. The police response, of suppressing protest whatever the cause might be, was the same. And, at least on one level, the people’s response was also identical, singing the song that conveys the message that this is our country.
III. The Birthday
June 15 was Xi’s birthday, and the machinery devoted to it ran in both directions — adoration up top, censorship down below.
A user was banned for 30 days for posting, the day before, “Tomorrow is my classmate’s birthday — who dares celebrate?” (”Classmate” has become a coded way to reference Xi.) The late actor Yu Menglong (俞蒙龙), who happened to share the June 15 birthday and whose death last year drew its own wave of censorship, was again treated as a sensitive figure. A stone on Tibet’s Mt. Kailash where mourners had stuck photographs of him — alongside images of dead parents, lost children, vanished pets — was locked inside a steel cage.
The adoration involved a national conference in Beijing to roll out “Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building” as a fresh sub-doctrine. Sinocism‘s Bill Bishop saw the move as institutionalization ahead of next year’s Party Congress. One-party rule and censorship are not generally thought of as human rights but Beijing squared the circle, while hosting a Global Human Rights Governance Forum (and launching a five-year plan for human-rights), with the slogan “the people’s happiness is the greatest human right.”
The counter-gift, and a very different view of what human rights are, came from Washington. On June 16, the US Senate passed by unanimous consent a resolution led by Senator Rick Scott condemning Xi and the Party for slave labor, the genocide of ethnic minorities and threats to US security. Scott called Xi “a brutal dictator leading a criminal organization that lies, cheats, steals, exploits slave labor, and commits genocide and crimes against humanity on an industrial scale.”
IV. “Now Is the Time to Change”
On June 14, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau launched a website inviting people inside China to submit intelligence, citing the practice of US, British and Israeli agencies. The website features a one-minute, AI-generated video called “Change”: a Chinese official watches colleagues investigated and removed, narrates that “old comrades are disappearing one after another, for no reason, without a word,” buys a new phone, and types “now is the time to change.” The site recommends operational hygiene — non-Chinese devices, factory resets, un-registered Wi-Fi, a VPN, private browsing — and is already blocked on the mainland.
Our broadcast stressed that the video tracks the CIA’s own 2025 Mandarin-language recruitment videos, which targeted Party cadres and, in a February release, PLA officers, against the backdrop of Xi’s military purges. We added our usual cautions for anyone tempted: anonymous email, fresh hardware, keep your identities separate.
The English-language analytic consensus this season — see Foreign Affairs‘ “Xi’s Forever Purge,” among others — portrays Xi’s continuous housecleaning as evidence of insecurity rather than strength: the dismantling of former vice-president Wang Qishan’s network, near-weekly takedowns of generals and retired provincial bosses, a discipline apparatus that, by the Wall Street Journal‘s reckoning, punished close to a million people last year. It probably feels more like strength than insecurity to the people who are being purged. But the forever purge does create a vulnerability that foreign agencies think they can exploit.
V. The End of Easy Capital, Continued
The capital story we have been tracking went to its two extremes this week — the very top of the market and the very bottom of the labor force.
At the top, the door closed. SpaceX’s IPO explicitly barred mainland-Chinese and Hong Kong investors on security grounds. (Bloomberg broke it; ProPublica later found Chinese stakes had been acquired quietly years earlier through a middleman.) Our June 14 broadcast extended the pattern to OpenAI, expected to do the same, with Anthropic possibly to follow.
At the bottom, the floor kept dropping. Our June 13 broadcast noted that direct construction employmentfell from 58.77 million to 51.14 million in a single year — roughly 7.6 million jobs, down nearly 13 percent — as the building sites that absorbed a generation of migrant labor get quiet. Meanwhile China’s outstanding government-bond stock passed ¥100 trillion, up about 15 percent year-on-year and doubled in five years, as the state borrows to hold the line.
The white-collar end of the squeeze has its own elegy. ChinaTalk‘s June 19 long read on how young Chinese are processing the arrival of AI spread further the popular meme that sums it up: “My ‘Skill’ is uploaded; my cubicle has been emptied.” The anxiety, authors Irene Zhang and Nick Corvino argued, is less about any single job than about “a crisis of meaning when the system stops promising guaranteed returns.”
Roll Call
June 13. Nantong, Jiangsu. The 55-year-old owner of a popular medicinal-chicken restaurant, Shuai Yunfeng, died on June 9 of injuries sustained after a male customer he had asked not to smoke beat him.
June 16. Dongguan, Guangdong. At a China–Korea school exchange, the Korean students performed K-pop on stage; the Chinese students, in school uniforms, performed synchronized calisthenics. “South Korea thought it had gone north,” ran one comment.
June 17. Wuhan. Xiaomi founder Lei Jun ate a traditional breakfast surrounded by a scrum of cameras. A passing young student, her school backpack bouncing, was overheard: “All these people to film a guy eating breakfast — give me a break.”
June 17. Jiangsu. Men in camouflage cut a home’s power and internet, pinned two elderly residents to the ground and beat them for some 15 minutes — the group, witnesses said, came with a doctor, who treated the victims afterward.
June 18. A delivery rider sent to collect a phone at a Huawei store was made to wait outside; staff would not let him set foot inside. “Huawei’s territory is sacred and inviolable,” went the caption.
June 18. On Jay Leno’s Garage, former US president Joe Biden recalled Xi asking him what gave America the right to claim Pacific hegemony. The clip was the week’s highest single engagement on our X feed, 9,363 likes.
What the Comments Tell Us
In Ningbo and Wuhan, as in Chongqing last week, ordinary people were contesting the state’s power, literally and narratively. These were China-only stories, missing from both Chinese and non-Chinese media. The commenters made it clear that such silencing does not render the stories any less powerful. People are finding their own ways to discover and tell the truth and put it in a meaningful narrative frame — by singing to police the national anthem, for example. Or by “electronic mothers” across the country keeping alive online the names of a missing mother, taken by police, and her buried child.