Year in Review: For Communist China, the Worst Is Yet to Come

This article is part of a special Epoch Times series reviewing the year 2019.

Tourists struggle to climb in the wind on an icy section of the Great Wall at Badaling in Beijing, China, on Nov. 30, 2019. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Not since 1949—the year the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized power and established a Leninist dictatorship over the world’s most populous country—has the regime faced such challenges as it does at the end of 2019.

So much so that Arthur Waldron, a prominent China historian at the University of Pennsylvania, says the regime is now in the process of “disintegration.”

The Center Cannot Hold

On Oct. 31, the elite Party conclave, the Fourth Plenum of the CCP Central Committee, concluded on a note of outward calm. An official communique stressed the guiding role of the Party in all public spheres and called for the upholding of “Party central authority and centralized and unified leadership” under Chinese leader Xi Jinping.