Storytime’s Over: Xi Jinping’s Tall Tales Crumble – And What Comes Next? | Digging into ChinaIn the grand theater of authoritarian rule, as Max Weber warned, legitimacy lives or dies by the stories we tell. China’s saga? Mao’s fiery revolutions birthed endless enemies and chaos; Deng’s pragmatic boom traded ideology for growth, buying decades of buy-in. Jiang and Hu fine-tuned the harmony, but Xi? He revived the struggle—anti-corruption crusades masking purges, prosperity myths masking slumps, zero-COVID victories masking trauma.
