OPINION | A Final Fire in Tiananmen: Xi’s Total Control Replaces China’s Democratic Past

by Ashu Mann

On January 23, 2001, a column of smoke rose from Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of the Chinese state, during an incident that was swiftly sealed off, narrated, and absorbed by official authority. The act of self-immolation that unfolded there, captured by state cameras yet forever contested in its causes and meaning, was not permitted to exist as an unscripted expression of dissent or despair.

Whatever the motives of those involved, the episode underscored a harsher truth that was already evident by the turn of the millennium. The space for organic political reform in China had effectively closed. This was not a harbinger of renewal or rupture, but a confirmation of finality, the quiet burial of any remaining expectation that the Chinese state would drift, even incrementally, toward pluralism rather than refine its capacity for absolute control.

The illusion that lingered in Western capitals after that moment, that economic integration might yet soften political rigidity, survived far longer than the reality on the ground justified. The self-immolation was not the spark of a Chinese Arab Spring. It was the incandescent epitaph of a democratic dream already reduced to ash. The tragedy affirmed what geopolitical realists had long suspected but rarely stated aloud. Chinese democracy was not in retreat; it was long deceased. What followed in subsequent decades was not a temporary authoritarian winter, but the settling of a permanent, glacial epoch of rule.

The architecture of this tyranny was finalized not in the streets, but in the sterile, velvet-draped halls of the Great Hall of the People. The pivotal moment of the republic’s demise occurred in 2018, when the constitution was amended with surgical precision to abolish presidential term limits. That legislative act functioned as a coronation, transforming the presidency from a bounded stewardship into an indefinite imperial tenure. It dismantled the lone, fragile safeguard the post-Mao order had preserved, the expectation of succession. By erasing political sunsets, the party calcified its leadership into a monolith, ensuring that the state became indistinguishable from the singular will of the Paramount Leader. The fire in the square was merely the physical manifestation of a population realizing it was trapped in a room with no exits and a ruler who would never leave.

This political sclerosis is enforced by a technological apparatus of unprecedented sophistication. The Social Credit System has effectively gamified subservience, constructing a digital panopticon in which behavior is continuously assessed, categorized, and ranked. This is governance by algorithm, the quantification of trust, loyalty, and obedience. In such a system, dissent is not merely punished; it is structurally precluded. Exclusion from the ledger does not signify social disapproval alone, but economic and civic erasure. To fall outside the system is to cease to function within society at all. Resistance is atomized before it can coalesce, replaced by the sterile order of databases where human complexity is flattened into compliance metrics.

While the domestic interior hardens under this suffocating stasis, the regime’s exterior projects confidence and expansion. Nations of the QUAD watch with mounting unease as the People’s Liberation Army Navy launches hull after hull in a maritime buildup of historic velocity. Yet this outward muscularity is a classic diversion. Aircraft carriers and missile tests are not merely instruments of deterrence; they are theater, designed to project vitality while masking the necrotic brittleness of the social contract within. The regime constructs fleets because it can no longer construct consent. It is a colossus with an armored fist and a hollow heart, counting on nationalism at sea to drown out the silence of the square.

The grim conclusion confronting the liberal order is that this dictatorship is not a fragile aberration awaiting collapse. It is a stable equilibrium. The fleeting openness of the reform era was the anomaly; the iron grip is the reversion to the historical mean. What we are witnessing is the apotheosis of the surveillance state, a model of governance that has insulated itself against the contagion of liberty.

Accordingly, the strategy of the free world must undergo a fundamental reorientation. Engagement aimed at reforming the center has reached its limits. Resources and attention must shift to the periphery. Support must be extended to exiled intellectuals, dissidents, and democratic movements operating beyond the reach of state security organs, those who preserve political memory and institutional imagination in the diaspora. If the spark has been extinguished on the mainland, it must be protected elsewhere. When the monolith eventually fractures under the weight of its own rigidity, there must exist a blueprint for renewal ready to be carried home. The fire in Tiananmen was smothered, but embers endure, waiting for a change in the wind.

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About the Author

Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD from Amity University, Noida, in Defence and Strategic Studies. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.