Open Letter asking Xi Jinping to Resign

In March 2016, an anonymous open letter, entitled The Open Letter about Calling for Comrade Xi Jinping's Resigning from His Leading Posts of the Party and the State, purporting to be from unnamed "loyal Communist Party members", allegedly resulted in the detention of dozens of Chinese citizens, including (temporarily) six relatives of two overseas dissidents.

Chinese media is heavily regulated; government censors often remove content on websites and social media. By 2015, China had 49 reporters behind bars, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; Freedom House had ranked the country as the world's worst abuser of internet freedom. In February 2016, Xi Jinping visited state media outlets in a tour widely seen as an attempt to further bring journalists to heel and to stamp out freedom of expression. Early 2016 saw a spate of publicized censorship incidents and a crackdown on journalists, lawyers, and dissidents.

In recent years, China has detained relatives of dissident writers living overseas to pressure the writers into self-censorship.

The open letter asking Xi to resign his post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (paramount leader and party leader), was first posted on Canyu, an overseas Website. It was republished by other outlets, most notably by the state-linked Watching.cn (also known as Wujie News), but was quickly taken down from Watching. The letter accuses Mr Xi of being a dictator and of committing serious economic and diplomatic blunders. The authors claim to be writing the letter out of concern for Xi and his family's "personal safety", which may be an implicit threat. The Wall Street Journal speculates that the open letter may indeed have been penned by dissatisfied insiders within the ruling Communist Party, as unlike typical dissident manifestos, the letter uses Party jargon and contains no call for significant democratic reform. Professor Xiao Qiang of the University of California, Berkeley, agreed the phrasing is unusual: "Bluff or true, this tone sounds more like coup plotters talking to the leader they want to depose, rather than an open letter with dissenting political views." On the other hand, the letter may be an elaborate ruse; there is no independent evidence of any coup plot.

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