When Will the CCP Fall? Will China Collapse First, or Fragment First?

The CCP is on the verge of collapse. Why? Because its economy has completely collapsed, and the CCP has long since abandoned any ideology -- the regime now runs entirely on self-interest. Why say the Chinese economy has completely collapsed? Because the nationwide phenomenon of delayed salaries for CCP civil servants has now persisted for a full year, and instead of improving, it has spread even to Shanghai and Guangdong, the provinces with the strongest public finances in the country. Anyone who understands the situation knows that civil servants, sitting at the top of the CCP's food-chain pyramid, are the privileged, vested-interest group with the best benefits and the most job security -- normally the last group to feel the impact of an economic crisis. If even civil servants are having their salaries withheld on a massive scale, just how severe must this economic crisis be? And just how dire must things be in other industries?

When the economy has gotten so bad that civil servants nationwide can't be paid, anyone who still insists that the Chinese economy hasn't collapsed and is merely "slowing down" is a fool I can only block and ignore. Civil servants nationwide going unpaid is a sign that local government finances everywhere have gone bankrupt. What is the state of local government finances right now? With China's real estate industry having collapsed, local governments -- heavily tied to real estate -- saw their debt soar to 83 trillion yuan in 2024, and they can't even pay the interest on their bank loans... How could their finances not be bankrupt? If public finances keep collapsing like this, the entire stability-maintenance system will come crashing down with them. With the whole structure on the verge of toppling, Xi Jinping and his CCP clique are being forced into a last-ditch struggle: from April 24 through October, China will issue "ultra-long-term" government bonds (20-year, 30-year, and 50-year) worth a total of 1.3 trillion yuan, attempting to raise money from the international community to save the CCP regime. But against a backdrop of demographic collapse, economic crisis, and, especially over the past month or so, the heavy bombardment of Trump's trade war, the outlook for these bond issuances is bleak, and the international community is uniformly pessimistic about China's prospects... Given that even this last-ditch struggle won't help, will the CCP collapse this very year? I don't think so. Why not? Not because China will hit bottom and rebound this year -- a country facing demographic collapse like China's is already too far gone for any rebound -- but because the CCP is a massive system, and massive systems carry enormous inertia. The CCP is like a giant airplane: even after its fuel has run out entirely, it can still glide for dozens, even over a hundred kilometers on sheer momentum before it finally crashes. What sustains this enormous inertia behind the CCP regime is, above all, the psychological expectations of the civil servant class. Even though CCP civil servants have gone over a year with delayed salaries, because their benefits have long sat at the top of the pyramid -- far more comfortable than every other class -- their mindset as a whole is steeped in a sense of superiority. This gives them a strong inertial expectation about the current regime: they expect and believe the "nation" will soon recover, and that their privileged treatment will be restored before long... What's more, the miserable state of other industries makes them realize that leaving the civil service would only be worse, with no way out. This is the fundamental reason why, despite widespread delayed salaries, civil servants as a group are generally still holding onto their posts and unwilling to leave. But everything has a breaking point. Civil servants, too, need food, clothing, shelter, and transportation -- they are not made of some special material immune to hardship. As time passes and their circumstances fail to improve, instead worsening, their mindset will gradually turn to despair, and they will ultimately "lie flat" (give up and disengage)... That will mean the collapse of the stability-maintenance system, and with it, the final arrival of the CCP regime's collapse. My assessment is that the critical threshold for civil servants' inertial expectations is two years: starting from 2024, when widespread salary delays first broke out, by 2026 the civil servant class's inertial expectations will be exhausted, and they will collectively fall into despair, inevitably followed by a mass "lying flat" of inaction... Add to that a wave of unemployment and gray-haired retirees unable to collect their pensions because social security funds have run dry, both pouring into the streets together, forming nationwide mass demonstrations -- and that is when the day of the CCP's final collapse will arrive. So, alongside the CCP's collapse, will China fragment first, or collapse first? My view: fragmentation first is impossible, again because of the powerful inertia of (centralized) unity. However, once the central government falls, sharp conflicts of interest among local governments will quickly spur them to roll out measures defending their own local interests, rapidly leading to regional fiefdoms, and border regions are bound to break away. For example: competing to attract population -- especially young people; competing for resources and energy; competing for territory... At the end of last year, Guangdong's provincial government issued a policy banning police from other regions from conducting "deep-sea fishing" operations against Guangdong residents (freezing bank accounts, confiscating deposits, and making arrests in Guangdong) without first obtaining approval from Guangdong police... This is, in effect, an early sign of the regional fragmentation that will follow the CCP's collapse, and such fiefdom-building is the prelude to fragmentation. In short, once the powerful central regime disappears, it is inevitable that China's local governments will move toward carving up territory and fragmenting due to competing interests -- until the various local governments reach a compromise and jointly form a federation, or until a powerful central regime once again emerges and subjugates the localities, only then will China be reunified.