Thread by @WilliamYang120

"While many of the city’s 25mn residents blame their enforced isolation on Xi and his zero-Covid policy, the future of Li and other top lieutenants hangs in the balance as pressure mounts on #Beijing to find a scapegoat for the chaos and embarrassment."ft.com/content/143b3b…

"The question weighing on Xi is what to do with Li, a close ally for two decades after the pair worked together in Zhejiang in the early 2000s, and Shanghai mayor Gong Zheng.

The decision will ripple through the party and return an unwanted spotlight to secretive infighting as a clutch of rising cadres compete for coveted top government positions."

“More and more voices are rising in Shanghai and inside the party, especially coming from [vice-premier] Han Zheng, asking Xi to force Li to step down,” said Alex Payette, chief executive of Cercius Group.

Payette believed Li’s ousting would cause “an earthquake” inside the party, disrupting a delicate system of alliances just ahead of a twice-a-decade party congress in November, when Xi’s third term is expected to be secured and the new politburo line-up unveiled.

“If Xi were to sacrifice Li, the message sent to his other allies [and current politburo members] like Chen Min’er, Ding Xuexiang and Cai Qi is that no one is safe and untouchable . . .

We expect Xi to bargain with other factions inside the party to keep Li in play, despite the ongoing Shanghai fiasco — though the same cannot be said for Gong,” Payette added.

@vshih2 said protection for the city’s leadership might stem not only from close ties with Xi but also from the Chinese leader being obscured from the true fallout from his zero-Covid policy.

“We don’t know the extent to which Xi Jinping sees the full extent of the lockdown policies in Shanghai; whether he knows that large numbers of people are going hungry,” he said.

We don’t know what kinds of information Shanghai is feeding to the central government. He is surrounded by private secretaries filtering information to him before it lands on his desk.”

Analysts at Cercius noted that while former Hubei party secretary Jiang Chaoliang and former Wuhan party secretary Ma Guoqiang were removed from their posts over the initial coronavirus outbreak two years ago, both men “survived”: ...

... no probe by the party’s internal discipline unit was launched and they were not expelled from the party.

Still, Payette said, as calls for accountability mount, political pressure might mean that Li does not follow his predecessors in rising from Shanghai to the politburo standing committee, and instead is “appointed elsewhere in the central party apparatus”.

@dianafutweets notes that from imperial China to the Xi era, a ruler’s legitimacy has relied on providing social goods.

“The party’s contract with society rests on guaranteeing not political rights but social rights — basic food, housing and healthcare to people . . .

Digital posts about starvation in one of China’s most prosperous cities — Shanghai — are effectively sounding an alarm bell that the party-state is not keeping up its end of the social contract,” she said.