Concerned About Potential Backlash, Xi Jinping is Worried About the Implications of 'lobster' Bottoming Out?

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[People News] As the Year of the Horse begins, an imported 'lobster' has stirred the Chinese mainland, striking at the heart of the CCP's authoritarian regime and Xi Jinping's digital totalitarianism.

In recent months, 'raising lobsters' has emerged as a hot tech buzzword in mainland China, creating a phenomenon-level AI storm that has swept across the nation.

OpenClaw, an AI entity developed by Austrian engineer Peter Steinberger in November 2025, has been affectionately dubbed 'lobster' by Chinese netizens due to its logo featuring a red lobster. Unlike large language models such as Claude and ChatGPT, 'lobster' can function as a personal secretary, responding to verbal commands from users. It can browse the web, write code, process data, analyse and compose documents, and send emails, taking full control of all software on your device to assist with various tasks. It can be deployed locally, requiring users to grant system permissions for it to become a loyal 'digital servant' at their command. The process of training and using OpenClaw is referred to by mainland netizens as 'raising lobsters.'

This 'lobster' has rapidly ignited a frenzy among mainland internet users. Of the 142,000 publicly visible OpenClaw agents worldwide, nearly half have been created by Chinese netizens. Within just a hundred days of its launch, OpenClaw has garnered a massive number of stars on GitHub, with contributions from mainland users triggering a digital tsunami.

On social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, tutorials on 'raising lobsters' have proliferated, spreading from the alleys of Beijing to the shores of West Lake in Hangzhou, with offline gatherings emerging rapidly. A free installation event at Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen drew nearly a thousand attendees, from young children to elderly individuals, all captivated by the trend. People are utilising OpenClaw for tasks such as office automation, programming, debugging, and even everyday activities like stock analysis and market research.

This unstoppable AI craze is clearly orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The so-called 'lobster gatherings' appear to be more a result of deliberate planning under official narratives than genuine grassroots enthusiasm. Xi Jinping and the CCP regard the AI industry as a new growth engine for the economy, tasked with the significant mission of reshaping China's economic structure and facilitating the CCP's transition to an innovative economic system. Simultaneously, Xi has elevated AI to a new level within the national macro strategy, emphasising national strength in global technological competition. The government is fully backing this initiative with comprehensive policy-making, investment guidance, research deployment, technological strategies, and public opinion management, illuminating the achievements of the national system in China.

Under this vigorous push for systemic advancement, not only the private sector but also local governments are getting involved in 'raising lobsters.' Regions like Longgang District in Shenzhen and the High-tech Zone in Wuxi are competing to roll out policies, offering subsidies and calculating resource and data support, with amounts reaching up to 5 million yuan. They proudly promote the concept of 'one-person factories,' claiming to achieve efficient production through AI agents.

Additionally, some regions have already introduced 'government lobsters'. According to a report by the Southern Daily, a group of civil servants in Futian, Shenzhen, have recently begun to 'raise' their own 'government lobsters'. Previously, addressing public complaints and suggestions relied solely on manual processes, where each complaint was reviewed and categorised individually. Now, 'government lobsters' can automatically 'digest' a large volume of public opinion and quickly generate a 'health report', serving as analysts for public demands.

Tech giants like Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance have rapidly jumped on the bandwagon, offering cloud deployment solutions and simplifying the installation process. With 'one-click deployment' from Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Baidu Cloud, even ordinary citizens can 'raise lobsters', making it accessible to all. But does this nationwide enthusiasm genuinely indicate technological progress and economic growth?

Not at all! On the contrary, the Chinese Communist Party is using this initiative to mask economic weaknesses, create a false sense of stability, and fabricate an illusion of technological prosperity. This also serves to distract from the power struggles at the top that have led to a governance crisis, as well as the anxieties surrounding the potential collapse of authoritarian regimes in Venezuela and Iran due to U.S. actions. This fervour is reminiscent of the 'Great Leap Forward', with the entire nation participating, state-owned enterprises getting involved, resulting in resource waste and a new technological bubble. Some netizens sarcastically comment: 'Everyone raises lobsters, lobsters become a major industry, but the reality of life and death is a different matter.'

However, just as the "lobster farming" phenomenon was sweeping the nation and igniting a wave of AI revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abruptly applied the brakes, leading to a sudden cooling of the situation. On March 8, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced that its cybersecurity threat and vulnerability information sharing platform had detected that certain instances of the OpenClaw open-source AI agent posed significant security risks under default or improper configurations, making them highly vulnerable to cyberattacks, information leaks, and other security issues. The statement also noted that due to the "ambiguous trust boundaries" in deploying OpenClaw, it could execute unauthorised operations due to command inducement, configuration flaws, or malicious takeover, resulting in a range of security risks, including information leaks and system control.

Several state-owned enterprises and government agencies have already issued strict bans on employees installing OpenClaw, and personal devices are not exempt; any personal device with OpenClaw installed must not be connected to office equipment. State-owned banks and institutions have received confidential directives requiring those who have installed the software to report to the authorities immediately.

In just a few months, the CCP has reversed its stance faster than one can flip a page, shifting from supporting open-source initiatives to isolating and restricting them, from nationwide celebration to sudden cold waves, and from mass steel production to warnings against usage. What is Beijing afraid of? Are they concerned about bringing lobsters into Zhongnanhai, leaking Xi Jinping's biological information and whereabouts, and accelerating the pace of America's decapitation strategy? It's difficult to say. Following the decapitations of Maduro and Khamenei by the U.S., rumours have emerged that Xi Jinping is digging deep holes in the Xishan area of Beijing to prepare for a potential emergency escape. Wherever Elon Musk's Tesla goes, Xi Jinping's cautious heart seems to pause, and in every location Xi Jinping visits, Teslas are strictly prohibited.

In reality, Xi Jinping's concerns about lobster farming extend beyond the immediate issues at hand. The OpenClaw deep integration system has the capability to take control of various software, monitor local documents, and execute commands autonomously. For Xi Jinping, the dictator of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this presents a double-edged sword; he appreciates its versatility but fears its potential for subversion.

The so-called data security touted by the CCP is essentially a concealed digital truth. To obscure the harsh reality of the economic downturn, the CCP has restricted access to genuine economic and industry data, including actual unemployment rates, real estate statistics, population figures, and bad debts within the financial system. Additionally, the personal assets of CCP officials may not yet be fully under the control of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), and the 'foreign lobster' could potentially reveal all of this. Furthermore, sensitive information such as military supply lists and financial records supporting Russia, clandestine dealings with Iran, Xi Jinping's plans for a Taiwan invasion, and critical evidence that could destabilize the CCP's authoritarian regime—such as the circumstances surrounding Li Keqiang's death and the arrests of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli—are all highly sensitive classified data that could be accessed by the 'foreign lobster' through various official 'personal assistant' channels.

The CCP's data censorship struggles against the global open-source movement. The tragedy of the CCP's AI lies precisely in this contradiction; if it prioritises data security and local models, creating a local 'Party Shrimp' that adheres to Party directives, it essentially admits that it is a flawed entity, akin to a dead shrimp in a polluted ditch, where a closed ecosystem falls behind the open innovation of the West.

In the intricate landscape of contemporary global geopolitics and the convergence of technology, the Chinese Communist Party's (Zhongguo Gongchandang) meticulous censorship mechanism inflicts a systematic trauma on the emerging technological ecosystem. This model of algorithmic governance, framed within the paradigm of 'digital authoritarianism,' not only distorts the global technological competition landscape from an economic perspective but also poses a challenge to the universality of human rights under international law. The technological innovation and productivity transformation that the Chinese Communist Party seeks ultimately reduces to mere instruments for maintaining stability within the dictatorship and tools for the expansion of communist totalitarianism, with their claimed pace of innovation significantly trailing behind the speed of self-destruction and collapse.

(Originally published by People News) △