In the early morning hours of Feb. 19, 2026, a song titled “Hong Kong” appeared on NetEase Cloud Music, China’s equivalent of Spotify, with a striking album cover: Xi Jinping’s standard identification photo, blurred with a mosaic filter. Within minutes, users began sharing the track across Chinese social media. The comment section exploded with mocking posts, thinly veiled insults directed at Xi, and what Chinese internet users call “storming the tower,” a slang term for openly attacking the country’s most powerful leader in a space the censors are supposed to control.
The track survived less than 30 minutes before it was pulled. The speed of its removal was itself a statement. China’s internet censorship system, already among the most aggressive in the world, treats any unauthorized use of Xi’s image as a top-priority threat. The mosaic filter over his face added a layer of mockery: by technically obscuring his identity, the creator forced everyone to acknowledge exactly who was being ridiculed.
Censors banned users permanently for leaving a single comment
The crackdown that followed the track’s removal was swift and indiscriminate. Multiple users reported that their NetEase Cloud Music accounts had been permanently banned simply for commenting on the song. One user on X (formerly Twitter), posting under the handle “midnight神乐,” wrote that a single comment was enough to trigger a permanent ban: “I didn’t insult anyone. I just asked what the point of that album cover was.”
The comment section, in the brief window before censors locked it down, captured the mixture of dark humor and barely disguised fury that defines political speech on China’s tightly controlled internet. Users wrote that the album cover was “ugly,” compared the figure to “my elementary school classmate,” and asked whether the person on the cover had ever attended middle school, all coded mockery of Xi, who is widely ridiculed online for his lack of formal education during the Cultural Revolution. Others issued warnings: “Watch what you say,” and “None of you in this comment section are getting away.”
Users compared punishments across platforms, revealing the depth of censorship
The incident prompted users across Chinese social media to compare notes on how quickly and harshly they had been punished for political speech on different platforms. One user wrote: “I made one comment about Cai Qi on Douyin and got banned for 30 days. If I had criticized Xi Jinping, they’d probably have me shot.” Cai Qi is the Politburo Standing Committee member who oversees the Party’s day-to-day operations and its propaganda apparatus.
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Another user noted that their NetEase account had been banned since 2018, suggesting that the platform’s political censorship has been escalating for years. The most shared comment from the episode distilled the dynamic with precision: “The speed of censorship always reveals the depth of the fear.”
Other users were more direct: “Public anger toward Xi Jinping has reached a new high.” One wrote: “Xi has set Chinese human rights and free speech back a hundred years. The Xi era is the darkest period in Chinese history.”
A viral thread cataloged the grievances driving public hatred of Xi Jinping
The NetEase incident did not occur in isolation. On Feb.15, 2026, four days before the album cover appeared, an X user posting under the handle “Fight for freedom” published a widely shared thread titled: “2026, and people inside and outside the Great Firewall are all asking: why do so many people despise Xi Jinping?”
The thread laid out four categories of grievance. First, economic devastation: the collapse of property giants like Evergrande and Country Garden wiped out the savings of tens of millions of families; youth unemployment exceeded 20 percent; private businesses were crushed by the Party’s push to expand state-owned enterprises at the expense of the private sector; foreign investment fled the country; and both the stock market and housing prices suffered repeated crashes.
Forty years of wealth accumulated since Deng Xiaoping opened up the Chinese economy in the late 1970s, the post wrote, had been “smashed to pieces under his personal command,” a reference to Xi’s signature phrase about “personally directing” China’s policies.
Second, suffocating political repression: internet purges, the disappearance of dissidents, the deaths of elderly residents locked in their homes during the Shanghai COVID lockdown, and three years of “zero-COVID” restrictions that treated citizens like caged animals.
Third, human rights atrocities across China’s ethnic and political frontiers: the mass internment of over one million Uyghurs in what the United Nations has called crimes against humanity; the national security law that crushed Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in a single sweep; and the reduction of Tibetan autonomy to a fiction. Inside China, the regime frames these campaigns as “counterterrorism” and “stability maintenance.” The rest of the world calls them what they are: ethnic cleansing and systematic political repression.
Fourth, diplomatic isolation: Xi’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy and massive foreign spending sprees have left China surrounded by hostile or wary neighbors, with few genuine allies.
The thread concluded: “When he took power, everyone looked forward to ‘Big Daddy Xi.’ Ten years later, the only thing left is ‘hoping he leaves soon.’ From the Party elite to ordinary people, from the economy to human rights, from domestic policy to foreign affairs, the accumulated grievances have become a volcano. Every normal channel for expressing dissent has been sealed shut. All people can do is vent through sarcasm, coded mockery, and even extreme curses.”
Commenters argued that the problem goes beyond one leader
In the replies to the “Fight for freedom” thread, many users pushed back on the framing that Xi alone is the problem. “It’s the entire CCP system people despise,” one commenter wrote. “If you got rid of him alone, would the world be any better? As long as the CCP exists, no one on earth gets peace.” Another wrote: “The real enemy is the CCP system itself. Without Xi, there would just be the next one. The only real solution is to dismantle the Chinese Communist Party.” A third put it more bluntly: “Dismantling the Communist Party, a criminal regime, is the only solution that addresses the root cause.”
