At the upcoming National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping is expected to hold onto the highest title in the land. But some of his people are quietly bestowing another: dictator.
Three days before one of the most important party meetings in history, a protester appeared on one of Beijing's busiest bridges to unfurl his banner and make his voice heard.
As well as taking the party — and its leader — to task over a stifling COVID-zero strategy, the banner read:
"Students go on strike, workers go on strike, remove dictator and China's traitor Xi Jinping.
"We want to vote, not a leader. Don't be slaves, be citizens."
The protester was swiftly arrested, and online discussion of the event was immediately censored, with Chinese citizens reporting their WeChat accounts were suspended after sharing protest images.
But against the din of opposing voices, Xi is poised to take on another five years leading China.
His decisions at the helm of a global superpower will continue to influence the daily lives of not only his people but the rest of the world as well.
The princeling without his people
Coming from an elite family, Xi enjoyed all privileges as the son of Xi Zhongxun, one of the key CCP leaders during Mao Zedong's era.
Even during the Cultural Revolution, when his father was denounced and Xi himself was forced to move to the countryside, he was still able to attend universities exclusive to descendants of elites at that time.
His colleague, China's Premier Li Keqiang, had to wait till 1977, when higher education was reopened to the public.
With his family connections, Xi was able to build his political portfolio by chairing important provinces and cities such as Shanghai, China's economic centre.
To many, Xi seemed destined for top office. But his decision to wield that power unrestricted has eclipsed most expectations.
For Chinese international student Tom, now 28 and living in Adelaide, Xi's decision to change the constitution and seek a third term as president is a betrayal.
But even Tom, who wants to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, recalls being shocked by the anti-Xi sentiment around the time the National People's Congress changed this rule.
He spotted a poster outside his university's library in Melbourne in March 2018: a black-and-white portrait of Xi Jinping, with huge red letters declaring NOT MY PRESIDENT.
"I didn't realise overseas Chinese students would protest [against Xi]," Tom said.
Many young Chinese people born in the 1980s and 1990s grew up learning, reciting and sitting in tests about the importance of keeping term limits on government leadership.
The rule that China's president and vice-president could serve no more than two terms was set by then-CCP leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.
While it didn't limit terms for the more important party leadership role, it was still seen as a key step to prevent another political turmoil like the Cultural Revolution, initiated by chairman Mao Zedong to keep his dictatorship over the party for life.
"I understand a term limit is important for a healthy government," Tom says.
"Maybe many people think Xi is good at his job — I don't have big complaints about him either. But that can't justify him staying in the position."
The constitutional change in 2018 sparked outrage online, while dozens of scholars, lawyers and journalists signed open letters against the change.
But it is not clear whether these dissenting voices provide a full picture of Xi's popularity among China's 1.4 billion-strong population, according to Lynette Ong, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.
"I think we do hear some dissenting voices, but these are [from] kind of highly educated urban citizens," Professor Ong said.
"In a place like China, we could never be very sure what people are thinking because there's no public opinion poll."
And even in the face of strong opposition from his people, Xi has managed to silence many of his critics before they speak out.
When Xi's dream replaced the Chinese dream
In January 2013, right after Xi took over the party, one of China's most respected newspapers, Southern Weekly, was forced to replace its New Year Editorial hours before it went to print.
The newspaper, known for its investigative journalism since the 1990s, had originally called for Beijing to undertake political reforms.
It was a response to Xi's calls for the "Chinese dream" — a lofty goal to become a "moderately well-off society" by 2021, marking 100 years of the CCP, and to be fully developed by 2049, the centenary of the People's Republic.
Southern Weekly had a different dream.
"Chinese people should be free. The Chinese dream should be the dream of constitutionalism," it wrote, urging Beijing to guarantee people's constitutional rights.
Many Chinese media scholars saw the censorship incident as the beginning of Xi's oppression of China's press freedom over the following decade.
And the Chinese people's dream addressed in this editorial has also faded over the past 10 years.
Since July 2015, over 100 lawyers in China have been raided, arrested and detained by police, with dozens put into prison for "inciting subversion".
These lawyers were known for defending labour rights, ethnic minorities and human rights activists in court.
And, seven years after the crackdown, many of them still remain under surveillance or house arrest, while their lawyer licences have been cancelled.
Then, when COVID-19 hit the country in 2020, Chinese authorities were handed a new remit to exert almost total control over citizens.
With COVID zero, Xi seeks total control
In order to implement China's strict COVID-zero policy, authorities recruited community volunteers to help enforce the measures, along with local officials and police.
Professor Ong, author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China, says the COVID-zero strategy is similar to Beijing's approach of mobilising street gangsters and grassroots brokers to maintain social stability.
"The government has been able to outsource a lot of everyday implementation and coercion to these people," she said.
This is a view shared by Willy Lam, senior fellow at Jamestown Foundation and adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
"So the imposition of many restrictions regarding COVID-19 is another way for Xi Jinping to test the ability of the party-state surveillance mechanism over ordinary people," he said.
On Chinese social media, many still show support and willingness to comply with authority orders, but some have also begun to resist the forceful approach taken by local officials.
Dr Lam says it has become "a political loyalty test".
"Regional county officials who successfully implement a strict lockdown policy will be considered loyal to Xi Jinping," he said.
The COVID-zero policy also highlights Xi's bid to win the battle with one of China's age-old rivals.
Rebuilding China as 'the new middle kingdom'
Xi's 10 years in power have spanned three US presidents: Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now, Joe Biden.
The past decade has also seen the increasingly competitive relationship between China and the US turn aggressive, pervasive and sometimes ugly.
Since 2016, as the Trump administration took a more hawkish approach to trade and diplomacy with Beijing, a secret dream of Xi's began to blossom.
"Xi Jinping is obsessed with the idea that the East is rising, while the West is declining," Dr Lam said.
"He is building up China as the new middle kingdom, the ultimate arbiter of international affairs."
Led by Xi's view on reshaping the world order, Beijing's diplomats actively launched an online attack to criticise Washington and the West, mostly via Twitter.
This inspired a new young generation of Chinese nationalists who not only cheered for their diplomats' "Wolf Warrior Diplomacy" but also joined the trolling army.
Their targets range from NBA team managers to ethnic Chinese female journalists working for Western media.
Melissa Chan, a Chinese American independent journalist and former China correspondent, said that while trolling existed before Xi's appointment, it had become more coordinated by the party in recent years.
"We're also seeing how the trolling is being done for both domestic Chinese audiences and foreign audiences — I've seen disinformation about me appear first on Twitter, and then cross over to WeChat and that ecosystem," Chan said.
Chan says while it remains unclear whether Chinese officials realise the negative impacts of nationalistic trolling, a bigger question is, "whether that really matters for Chinese decision-makers these days".
Chan believes China's nationalism will continue to flare in Xi's third term, while Dr Lam argues China will likely continue to strengthen its Wolf Warrior Diplomacy in the next decade.
A new approach in Xinjiang and Hong Kong
Xi's relentless pursuit of COVID zero and the anti-US nationalism during his reign have at times drawn comparisons with Mao's Cultural Revolution, the mass political campaign that turned to disaster in the 1960s.
But for one region, Xi's approach feels far more draconian than Mao's.
In Xinjiang, where Uyghurs and other Muslim groups reside, restrictions on religious practice and ethnic customs stretch back to the days of the Cultural Revolution.
"It was not only Uyghurs, the others were also targeted, the Han Chinese as well," said Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, on Mao's Cultural Revolution.
"But now, during Xi Jinping's time, he targets only Uyghurs — destroys Uyghur culture, Uyghur religion, Uyghur identity, and eliminates Uyghur people as an ethno-religious identity."
A 48-page report released by the United Nations in September states that "serious human rights violations" have been committed in Xinjiang against Uyghurs and other communities since 2017, in the name of counter-terrorism.
China has denied these accusations.
Kanat believes what has happened in Xinjiang could take place in other parts of China.
"I think they chose the Uyghurs as the testing ground for everything, for repression methods, for using technology to control the people," he said.
Kanat fears Xi may export the repression mechanism to other regions, potentially Hong Kong.
Back in the 1950s, Mao believed the CCP should take a slow, cautious approach toward the former British colony, due to its close political and economic relations with the West.
This has been cautiously followed by all of Mao's successors — until Xi.
"Before Xi became the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, I think the playbook was using the boiling frog method," said Anna Kwok, strategy and campaign director at the US-based Hong Kong Democracy Council.
"The CCP would just quietly and slowly assimilate more Chinese politics and also economic coercion to Hong Kong, so that when the 50 years [of 'One Country, Two Systems'] is up, Hong Kong is ready to be just another Chinese city."
But Xi has taken a different approach. Hong Kong has been on his agenda since 2007, when he was assigned as a CCP figure responsible for Hong Kong affairs — the final task to prove his competence as the next party leader.
In 2012, the city's then-newly elected chief executive CY Leung, who Xi supported during the election campaign, proposed introducing China's Moral and National Education at Hong Kong schools.
This sparked debates and protests in Hong Kong at that time, with parents, teachers and students worrying it was just the Hong Kong version of China's patriotic education.
Ten years later, Beijing has triggered several political upheavals in the city, with a boundless National Security Law and arrests of politicians, journalists and teenage students who disagree with its power over the city.
In March, Beijing appointed former police chief officer John Lee as the city's new leader — a man who once visited Xinjiang and noted Hong Kong could borrow the region's "counter-terrorism experience".
According to Kwok, Hong Kong now prioritises national security over its role as an international financial hub.
"The message being sent here is that the CCP does not care whether Hong Kong is still a functioning city that has proper policies in place."
Xi's vision for China's future mirrors the past
When Xi took over in 2012, the world — including Australia — expected he would lead the CCP and China to further embrace democracy and a market economy.
Instead, a decade later they are facing a leader whose desire to rewrite the world order has led to a far more dominating, aggressive and isolated presence than before.
Independent analyst Qiang Wu says Xi has also demonstrated a strong personality and ambition to stand shoulder to shoulder with his predecessors Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, driven by his desire to be remembered as the man who made China strong.
But Xi's vision for China did not come from nowhere.
Geremie Barmé, sinologist, historian of the CCP and the founding director of the Australian Centre on China in the World, said he was "completely unsurprised" by how Xi's era has unfolded.
"And what has surprised me, oddly, is that it hasn't been worse than it is," Barmé said.
He described Xi and his generation of politicians as "Chairman Mao's children", sold on the idea of executing their party's ideology well into the future.
"Much of what Xi Jinping … and his colleagues have done is a continuation of this long-term, systemic, institutional, ideological and political struggle with the West," Barmé said.
"Xi is both the heir and inheritor of the Communist cause, but he is also its ultimate exemplar, its ultimate expression, and he would regard himself as being the embodiment of this greater cause of this enterprise.
"He regards himself as an instrument of history."
Barmé argues Xi's approach to governance mostly mirrors previous decisions by the party.
For instance, Barmé noted that while the COVID-zero policy seemed to be Xi's innovation, it was the same thinking behind China's Great Fire Wall of the 1990s that blocked its Chinese citizens' access to the world wide web.
This same idea applies to Xi changing the constitution to seek a third term.
As Barmé pointed out, Xi's predecessors Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin retained control of the party for several years after retiring as president.
What should Australians expect from Xi's third term?
Right before the Party Congress, Chinese state media stressed the country would stick with COVID-zero policies.
Several China experts told the ABC that the US and its allies, including Australia, should expect China to seek further domination of the Asia-Pacific region.
Professor Jocelyn Chey, a former diplomat who helped establish Australia's embassy in China in the 1970s and is now visiting professor at the University of Sydney, said it was time for Australia to rethink its position in the region, along with its relations with the US and China.
She disagreed with the opinion that Australia needed to pick sides.
"We should be acting in our own interest, not just looking at who's got the bigger goodie bag," Professor Chey said.
"One should expect that [Xi] is going to remain in power for some years to come, and he is not going to change his policy. We just have to plan ahead, knowing that we should be dealing with a power, if not a superpower."
Tom, who is now seeking to permanently stay in Australia, said he didn't care much about what might happen in Xi's third term, "as long as there is no war".
But he does worry that if he returns to China, he would have to adopt the stressful "996" work-life style — working from 9am to 9pm for six days a week, common for employees in China's big tech companies.
Last year, the CCP condemned the opposite "lying flat" lifestyle and urged young people to work hard amid the economic slowdown during the pandemic.
"The reason why I want to stay in Australia isn't related to China's politics," Tom said.
"Australia's economy may not look good, but at least they don't have '996' like China."
But then he paused.
"Well, maybe that's indeed related to politics."
