Has China entered what I have called the era of “late communism,” a term I use to describe the CCP’s terminal phase, comparable to the final years of the Soviet Union? The CIA, the institution outside China with the deepest intelligence on the country, appears to believe it has. And these recruitment videos are the most direct external confirmation of that belief.
Since 2025, the CIA has released three Mandarin-language recruitment videos across YouTube, X, and other social media platforms. These productions are aimed at the most sensitive populations inside the Chinese system: officials, military officers, and insiders with access to classified information. They use Mandarin voiceover and simplified Chinese subtitles, and they construct fictional “awakened” protagonists whose monologues strike at the defining pain points of a regime in decline: rampant corruption, factional power struggles, institutional breakdown, economic stagnation, and personal despair.
These are strategic-level psychological operations, crafted with the core assumption that the CCP’s governing order is collapsing from within.
The military video dropped weeks after China’s top general was purged
On Feb. 12, 2026, roughly three weeks after Zhang Youxia, the vice chairman of China’s top military command body, the Central Military Commission, was detained and placed under investigation, the CIA released a new 90-second video titled “The Reason to Stand Up: To Save the Future.” The regime announced that Zhang and the commission’s chief of staff Liu Zhenli faced charges of “serious violations of discipline and law,” the standard Party euphemism used to mask political purges as legal proceedings.
The protagonist is a mid-level military officer. The camera opens on the routines of military life, framed as duty to country and people, before pivoting sharply to disillusionment: “Day after day, the truth becomes increasingly clear. What the leaders are truly protecting is only their own selfish interests. Their power is built upon countless lies.”
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“Anyone with real ability is viewed as a threat and unceremoniously pushed aside.”
“I cannot let these madmen shape the world my daughter will inherit.”
The timing was calculated. This video implicitly confirmed three things about the state of China’s military: corruption at the top has reached a critical stage; officers with integrity are being systematically purged and sidelined; and the people running the system are, in the CIA’s framing, irrational actors steering the country toward catastrophe.
Zhang Youxia was once considered Xi Jinping’s closest military ally. Both men are so-called “princelings,” children of revolutionary-era CCP leaders whose family connections form an informal power network within the Party. Zhang’s father had served alongside Xi’s father during the Chinese Civil War. His arrest on Jan. 24, 2026, along with that of Liu Zhenli, left the Central Military Commission with only two members: Xi Jinping, the CCP’s general secretary and China’s top leader, and Zhang Shengmin, a career political commissar with no operational command experience.
Nearly every general Xi handpicked for the commission after the Party’s 2022 leadership congress, the closed-door event where Xi stacked the military’s top ranks with his chosen loyalists, has since been purged.
The officials’ videos targeted a ruling class already looking for an exit
In May 2025, the CIA released two earlier videos aimed at Chinese Communist Party officials. These were titled “The Reason to Cooperate: Be the Master of Your Own Fate” and “Creating a Brighter Future.” They portrayed senior and junior officials navigating a system that had turned predatory:
“You have worked diligently your whole life, climbing to a high position, yet you are trapped in a system you cannot escape. No matter how high your rank, it is not enough to protect your family in this treacherous and volatile time. Everything you have could vanish in an instant.”
The pitch was blunt: find an exit for your family, seize control of your own fate under a regime that rules by caprice, and align yourself with an external order that offers security. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the two videos received more than five million views on their first day.
The scripts never use the term “late communism.” Yet the world they depict is one of terminal decay. The regime no longer offers security. Ideological belief has evaporated. All that remains is a zero-sum competition for survival among elites who know the system is failing. The officials in these videos are portrayed as a class defined by universal despair, their loyalty hollowed out, needing only a secure channel to defect.
The release timing reinforced the message. Each video arrived in the wake of a high-profile purge or leadership crisis, amplifying the psychological impact of the CCP’s own instability.
The CIA is selling a worldview, and the price is secrets
What distinguishes the CIA’s China campaign from conventional intelligence recruitment is its underlying logic. The pitch operates on a deeper level than cash for secrets. It offers a replacement framework for understanding reality.
The videos are built on three interlocking assumptions about the CCP’s condition:
First, the regime has no viable future. Power “is built on lies.” The leadership is “detached from reality.” The system is “unsustainable.” This framing renders a clinical verdict on a patient in intensive care.
Second, everyone inside the system already knows this. The videos appeal to the survival instinct. “Your position offers no protection.” “Your family has no safety net.” “Everything you have could vanish in an instant.” The defining feature of late communism is universal insecurity among those who nominally hold power. The CIA’s offer is positioned as moral rescue: “fighting for my family and my nation.”
Third, sharing intelligence is reframed as an act of conscience. “The truth” becomes the ultimate call to action. The “insiders” are invited to believe that passing information to a foreign intelligence agency is an act of justice, a way to serve their country by hastening the collapse of a system that has already failed. This is a precise harvesting of the widespread disillusionment that defines a regime in its final stage.
The China videos are more aggressive than the CIA’s Russia and Iran campaigns
Compared with the CIA’s earlier Mandarin-language instructional posts and its Russian-language and Farsi-language recruitment campaigns, the 2025 and 2026 China videos place far heavier emphasis on personal destiny, family security, and saving the future. The Russian videos, which CIA officials say yielded measurable results and inspired new intelligence sources, appealed primarily to patriotic disillusionment and professional frustration. The Chinese videos go further. They presuppose that the individuals watching have already concluded the system is doomed, and they offer a practical escape route for people who are shopping for one.
The CIA is making a strategic bet: this regime has entered its final chapter, and the smart money is on building relationships with the people inside it who are already planning their exit.
The CCP’s military purges show a system consuming its own leadership
Totalitarian systems pursue absolute power: unified thought, unified resources, unified control over human destiny. The more power concentrates at the top, the more the system turns inward. The tighter the control, the faster vitality drains from every institution beneath it.
What is happening in China today confirms this pattern. The CCP has entered a stage of systemic decay. Public discontent, officials seeking escape routes, military officers losing faith in the chain of command: these all stem from the same source. They are the structural consequences of a system that has devoured its own foundations.
Xi Jinping’s military purges illustrate the dynamic with brutal clarity. Since the Party’s 2022 leadership congress, nearly every senior general Xi personally appointed to the Central Military Commission has been removed. Former Party-controlled defense ministers Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, former vice chairman He Weidong, former political director Miao Hua, and now Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli have all fallen. The commission, typically a body of seven members, has been gutted to two. Analysts at The Diplomat have described the current level of leadership instability as unprecedented since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The regime frames each of these purges as part of its so-called “anti-corruption campaign,” but the scale and pattern reveal something far beyond graft: this is a system consuming its own leadership class.
The real question is what replaces the CCP
I have said repeatedly: when late communism ends matters less than what replaces it. As a person of faith, I believe the answer lies beyond politics. If the Chinese people turn to God in sufficient numbers, China itself can be transformed from within, the way the ancient Israelites transformed their bondage in Egypt into the promise of a new homeland. The biblical narrative of exodus, of a people passing from slavery into a land of freedom, is the pattern I see for China’s future.
The CIA’s recruitment videos are nothing more than the outside world’s cold-eyed recognition of this turning point. American intelligence officers have seen the comprehensive decay inside the Chinese system, and they are using the most pragmatic tools at their disposal to accelerate it. Real redemption can only come from within the heart of every Chinese person.
I have promoted the term “late communism” repeatedly on X because I want it to become a shared understanding. When everyone takes it for granted, when “late communism” evolves from an internet catchphrase into a historical label, the real turning point will have arrived.
The CIA’s recruitment advertisements amount to eulogies for a dying regime. They tell Chinese insiders, in the starkest possible language: late communism has entered its final stretch. The future is in your hands.
By Liu Junning
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