Courtyard Culture: Xi Jinping Encounters the Aristocratic Culture of Yu Zhengsheng

The persecution has backfired in a vague manner, with power being stripped away, leaving him in a position that is merely ceremonial. (Illustration by People News)

[People News] On November 7, Fang Hongwei, Party Secretary of Xi’an, Shaanxi, was officially announced to have fallen. The collapse of the Shaanxi officialdom implicated Xi Yuanping—the “distant Prince”—and, according to disclosures from self-media figures Jiang Wangzheng and “Xiaoshuojia,” Xi Yuanping took at least 540 million HKD from Yao Lijun and over 3 billion RMB from Fang Hongwei. At that time, the whole world was watching to see how Xi Jinping would handle this major corruption scandal. Yet Xi Jinping was absent from the “Rule of Law Governance Conference” held in Beijing from November 17–18. It was obvious: Xi’s message was that there is no rule of law within the Party—only Xi’s rules. Then, on November 20, Xi Jinping held an extremely high-profile ceremony commemorating the 110th birthday of Hu Yaobang. Commentators began analysing whether Xi intended to return to Reform and Opening, or had another agenda.

I. A High-Profile Commemoration—Perhaps a Warning

Comparing the speeches given at this commemoration with those at Hu Yaobang’s 100th birthday celebration in 2005: Mentions of Deng Xiaoping dropped from 5 to 0; Mentions of “reform”: from 21 (Deng-style reform) down to 9 (new-era reform); Mentions of Hu Yaobang: from 33 down to 11; Mentions of “the people”: from 27 down to 15. The most eye-catching scene was the gathering of many “Red Second Generation” elites. Liu Yuan’s face was stiff and incredulous; Hu Yaobang’s descendants were seated in a corner, clearly displeased. On the rostrum sat Xi Jinping and his eunuch-like enforcers—Cai Qi and CCDI chief executioner Li Xi. The message was unmistakable: “Who dares resist? My knife-holders will deal with you.”

Some say Xi Jinping’s governing philosophy is like “the mafia,” but he lacks the mafia’s sense of loyalty. His former chief aide, Zhong Shaojun, is the best example: after years of loyal service, he may end up taking the fall for Xi’s negligence in military appointments. Others say Xi has an “imperial mentality,” enjoys watching subordinates fight, and thus better controls them. But what ruler lets his subordinates fight to the death while he simply watches? Self-media commentator “Cao Cao Says” has shown that Xi’s governing style is fundamentally shaped by the “courtyard culture” of Party elite compounds.

II. Xi Jinping and Courtyard Culture

The “Courtyards” were political creations of the CCP during the revolutionary and early PRC era—compounds that housed top central cadres, military leaders, and their families, isolated from broader society. The “Red Second Generation” raised there were trained as political animals from childhood, lacking humanity, fully absorbing the CCP’s toolkit of evil, deceit, incitement, hooliganism, espionage, plunder, struggle, destruction, and control. Today, they form the backbone of CCP rule.

1. Politics, power, and hierarchy are their life’s main themes.

During the 1958 Great Leap Forward and the famine of the early 1960s, while people starved, courtyard children grew up in an environment of abundant resources, free from worry, enjoying privileges, and being instilled with values of power hierarchy, political struggle, and internal loyalty.

They never lived like ordinary people, cared nothing about “grain and vegetables,” and certainly had no simple ideals like “facing the sea, spring blossoms.” In that half-closed micro-society, “power” was the natural order. They had no understanding or sympathy for the suffering of ordinary people. Anyone who befriended commoners was treated as an oddball and isolated. Films like Feng Xiaogang’s Youth (Fanghua) and Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang Canlan de Rizi) portray the mentality of that generation shaped by courtyard culture. Their conflicts were never resolved through common sense, but by whose parents outranked whose. Among equals, brute force decided the outcome. Group fights were routine.

In 2022, Xi Jinping told Canada’s PM Trudeau: “This is not good to say.” In courtyard slang, this is a pre-fight warning meaning: “I can’t control what happens next—we’re about to start fighting.” Xi carried this street-level courtyard idiom into diplomacy, showing how deeply the culture shaped him.

2. No empathy; they view commoners as toilet paper—use and discard.

Courtyard children had access to resources ordinary people could never imagine—foreign books, overseas films—but they could not see the hardships of society’s bottom layer. Their superiority and isolation coexisted. From childhood, they learned political manoeuvring and struggle. They used commoners as tools in their fights but felt no sympathy when those commoners were harmed.

Xi’s treatment of Zhong Shaojun, or of Xi Yuanping’s bagmen Yao Lijun and Fang Hongwei, reflects the same cold indifference: they never saw these ordinary-born men as people—only tools to be discarded.

Returning to Fang Hongwei’s fall: everyone knows Xi’an is “the distant Prince Xi Yuanping’s” domain. Who would dare investigate him? According to Jiang Wangzheng, the case was handled by Shaanxi Party Secretary Zhao Yide and CCDI inspection official Li Jianming. Li Jianming is Yu Zhengsheng’s henchman; Zhao Yide rose in Zhejiang, Yu Zhengsheng’s territory. No public reports link them, but “hometown ties” are universally accepted in CCP officialdom.

III. Yu Zhengsheng and Aristocratic Culture

Yu Zhengsheng of Shaoxing, Zhejiang, is no ordinary figure. Public records show Jiang Qing’s four husbands were Yu Qiwei (alias Huang Jing), Tang Na, Zhang Min, and Mao Zedong. Yu Qiwei was Yu Zhengsheng’s father.

During the late Qing Dynasty, the Yu family was prominent in poetry, education, and politics. Yu Mingzhen married a granddaughter of Zeng Guofan. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, Yu Mingzhen helped Tang Jingsong defend Taiwan. Yu Mingzhen’s younger sister’s daughter—Zeng Guofan’s great-granddaughter Zeng Xianzhi—married Ye Jianying. Thus, Yu Zhengsheng’s father, Yu Qiwei (Huang Jing), had to call Ye Jianying “uncle-in-law.”

The Yu family made “KMT-CCP kinship” literal through marriage. Yu Mingzhen’s third younger brother, Yu Mingyi, also married a granddaughter of Zeng Guofan. Their eldest son, Yu Dawei, studied in the U.S., then went to Taiwan and became the Defence Minister and the Transportation Minister under Chiang Kai-shek. Yu Dawei and Chiang Ching-kuo became in-laws when Chiang’s daughter married Yu’s son, Yu Yanghe.

Yu Zhengsheng’s older brother, Yu Qiangsheng, was adopted by Kang Sheng, the notorious CCP secret police mastermind who persecuted Xi Jinping’s family for 15 years. When Kang fell from power, Yu Qiangsheng defected to the U.S., where he became a division director at the NSA. In 1988, while travelling in South America, he was assassinated by five agents sent by Deng Xiaoping. Despite his father being killed over Jiang Qing, and his brother being killed by Deng, Yu Zhengsheng somehow maintained good relations within the CCP elite networks. He even had a close relationship with Deng Xiaoping’s son Deng Pufang, who recruited him in the early 1980s to run the Sichuan “Kanghua Company.”

Yu manoeuvred deftly across Party factions, and despite his family’s chaotic and bloody history, he remained on friendly terms with courtyard-born Xi Jinping. At age 67, during the 18th Party Congress, he was elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee in charge of the CPPCC.

Yu Zhengsheng is completely different from Xi Jinping, who is “both confident and sensitive, both wild and fragile,” and whose behavioural pattern is “always acting in groups, and running if he can’t win.” Yu’s thinking is cautious and conservative; his actions deliberate and steady.

Of course, Yu Zhengsheng is not the only one within the CCP opposed to Xi Jinping. According to the self-media figure Dabao Wangchao, the disgraced Inner Mongolia chairwoman Wang Lixia confessed in prison to an affair with Xi Yuanping during her time in Shaanxi. Self-media figure Du Wen reported that the powerful Wang Yun family of Inner Mongolia intervened to save her life, likely angering Xi Jinping, who had intended to use Wang Lixia as a political sacrifice. Soon afterwards, online news erupted about a public spat between Luo Yonghao and the restaurant chain “Xibei.” Self-media figure Zhou Mingfeng said he received a letter from Luo, who claimed to be a CCP spy acting under orders from the “Eastern Big Brother”—the Xi family—to destroy Xibei. The Xibei brand is linked to elite Inner Mongolian clans, possibly the Yun family.

Taken together, it becomes clear that China’s aristocratic-lineage families are resisting the courtyard-born Xi Jinping and his personal dictatorship. Xi’s economic policy of “state advances, private retreats” is intended to weaken these powerful clans. A song recently popular in mainland China, “Mud Talks,” includes the line: “When gods fight, mortals suffer.” This describes the struggle since Xi’s push for a third term in 2020—the battle between the courtyard-culture Xi Jinping and the aristocratic clans.

(First published by People News)