Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’re revisiting a 2020 piece by Cai Xia, who worked as a prominent scholar in Beijing until she was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party that year after publicly denouncing the CCP and Chinese President Xi Jinping. In this essay, Cai documents how she went from being a loyal member of the CCP and a proud defender of its policies to someone who was “secretly harboring doubts about the sincerity of its beliefs and its concern for the Chinese people.”
Cai worked for 15 years at the Central Party School in Beijing, where she taught Marxist political theory to high-ranking officials. She was therefore able to offer a rare inside look at how, under Xi, China had grown more repressive and dictatorial. “People who haven’t lived in mainland China for the past eight years can hardly understand how brutal the regime has become, how many quiet tragedies it has authored,” Cai writes.
Born into a Communist military family, Cai grew up steeped in CCP ideology. “All I could see was socialism’s bright future,” she recounts. “I was a true believer.” She began to gain a more sophisticated understanding of CCP thought when she joined the People’s Liberation Army at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1969, at which point she began reading Western literature and political philosophy—in secret. But she continued to hew to China’s official ideology, and ended up studying Marxist theory and the history of the CCP at a party school: “So devoted was I to the CCP’s line that behind my back, my classmates called me ‘Old Mrs. Marx.’”
But by the early 2000s, she began to have misgivings: Beijing’s strict ideological, economic, and political control no longer felt suited to meet the demands of the time. Cai was buoyed by hopes that the CCP would embrace reform and ultimately move toward democracy—and describes her disappointment upon realizing that the party was sticking to the ideological status quo: “I felt for the first time that the system I had long considered sacred was in fact unbearably absurd.”
In 2013, Cai watched with dismay as Xi unveiled a new ideological campaign rooted in domestic surveillance and the party’s totalitarian rule. “I wondered how I could remain part of this system,” she writes. By 2019, she had left China for the United States. “After 20 years of hesitation, confusion, and misery, I made the decision to emerge from the darkness and make a complete break with the party. Xi’s great leap backward soon left me with no other choice.”
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