When Extremes Are Reached, Reversal Is Inevitable! An Anti-Communist Wave Is Brewing in Silence

An Anti-Communist Wave Is Brewing in Silence

[People News] Now, looking back at China in 2025, although there have been no earth-shattering explosions of sound, and although street protests have been breaking out one after another across the country, they have not yet formed a large-scale tidal wave of resistance. The economy is sluggish and unemployment is severe. Although the authorities have not announced an economic collapse, the lives of people at the bottom are slowly growing colder, and a kind of hopeless lament fills China’s online space. When despair becomes the main theme among grassroots circles, at this point, when things reach an extreme they must reverse: “Down with the Communist Party,” “The Communist Party step down,” and replacing it with a new government may also become powerful calls.

On the last day of 2025, on Chinese social platforms such as WeChat and Douyin, the voices of netizens lamenting their hardships spread everywhere. “Yesterday we were still working; today the factory has shut down, and the boss has run away.”

One netizen sighed at life’s helplessness in a video. The blogger said: I’m now in a migrant workers’ village in Guangzhou; everyone here is heading back to their hometowns. Business here is bad. Many people are living off their savings and can’t even pay the rent anymore. Many people really can’t hold on.

Another female blogger said: Because there’s nothing to do here in Guangzhou, more and more people are going back. After several years like this, even people who work for wages may end up losing money.

One blogger said: Dongguan has fewer and fewer people now. Wages are low and debts are high. Many of those massive factories with tens of thousands of workers in Dongguan now have hardly anyone left. You hardly see anyone on the streets anymore; the old scenes of seas of people are gone forever. Many large factories have moved away—some to Southeast Asia. Brick-and-mortar shop business is also getting harder and harder; they can’t even afford the rent.

A young netizen said: Brothers, I’m going back to Yunnan today. Because I can’t find a job here in Guangzhou. I really can’t hold on anymore.

At the same time, the private living space of Chinese citizens is also quietly changing, with personal privacy rights being swallowed bit by bit. Since mid-September this year, grassroots governments in many parts of China have successively strengthened rental housing management systems. Some cities require tenants to register under their real names and synchronize the information with public security or community systems. A renter in Guangdong wrote on a local forum: “Even renting a place requires filing; we have to report even just to stay alive.”

An anonymous netizen suspected of working in online content review said: “Every day we receive new keyword list updates. We only know what we’re not allowed to say, but we don’t know why we’re not allowed to say it.”

The three most common sentences on social media have also changed accordingly. No longer arguments, but: “No way,” “Forget it,” “Don’t say it.”

Under such high pressure, Chinese citizens have also begun to show emotions of resistance, appearing on the streets and on social media in scattered, non-organized ways. According to compilations of publicly available media reports and online information, since the first half of 2025, individual vicious incidents have occurred in multiple parts of China, including armed assaults, retaliatory attacks, and vehicles deliberately ramming pedestrians. Although all of these incidents were individual acts, they display a tendency that some netizens have called “emotion-driven violence.”

According to data released by “China Dissent Monitor,” under Freedom House, in the third quarter of 2025 alone approximately 1,392 protest or collective action incidents were recorded, an increase of about 45% compared with the same period in 2024. The groups involved included workers, property owners, villagers, and other different social strata.

A social psychology researcher told reporters anonymously: “In the past, vicious cases mostly had backgrounds of interest disputes or family conflicts, but some of the incidents this year carry a stronger color of retaliating against society. No organization, no demands, no slogans—just spontaneous loss of control after pressure has accumulated to the limit.” He said: “This kind of emotion that cannot be predicted, cannot be dialogued with, and cannot be appeased is the most difficult thing for any governance system to handle.”

At this moment of stepping out of 2025, no one can be certain where the next stage will go. But the growing silence itself is very likely a process in which emotions of resistance are being bred and accumulated. Once a critical point is reached, it may be the outbreak of a nationwide anti-Communist wave. Recently, many videos have shown that in the collective protest incidents now taking place, the public often shout “Down with the Communist Party,” “The Communist Party step down,” and “Xi Jinping step down.” These slogans can awaken those silent citizens as well, rousing them to fight a decisive battle against tyranny in order to reclaim a way to live. △