If you’ve ever wanted to know what Chinese political paranoia looks like in action, congratulations! The CCP just handed us the perfect specimen.
Turns out, Xi Jinping’s ongoing purge of senior officials has gotten so intense, so incomprehensible, and so secretive, that an actual underground market has emerged.
Chinese citizens are now literally paying money to access what appear to be leaked details about which officials are under investigation. Shadowy online groups claim to have insider information on the next wave of purges.
According to Bloomberg, authorities are playing whack-a-mole trying to shut these leaky groups down. But they can’t because the demand is too high. This is the price of the CCP making itself a total black box.
The purge market is just the symptom. The disease is that the CCP created a system with no stability, no clear rules, and no way to know if tomorrow you’ll be promoted or investigated. So citizens and lower-ranking officials are doing the rational thing: trying to buy information to stay ahead of the knife. Or maybe they’re just betting for money, like Polymarket for General Hostility.
This also reveals something much darker about CCP governance. It’s not like these are leaks from innocent whistleblowers. These are just corrupt people trying to navigate a corrupt system. Can they be trusted to predict what’s coming next? Buyers hope so.
Hellbound and Down 