In late 2012, China’s outgoing president, Hu Jintao, warned that corruption was a clear and president threat to the Chinese Communist Party. “If we fail to handle this issue well,” he said, “it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state.”
Since coming to power, President Xi Jinping has tried to shore up the CCP’s legitimacy by launching an aggressive anti-corruption drive combined with a mass line campaign attempting to drum up support for the Party and tamp down dissent [More here].
In his bid to strengthen the ruling Party’s position and dominance, Xi Jinping has actively reigned in China’s media and sent a harsh message to dissidents and rights defenders through the persecution of the likes of Xu Zhiyong and Pu Zhiqiang.
In the above cartoon, posted by artist Kuang Biao (邝飚) to Sina Weibo, an ear-tagged pig representing, presumably, the Chinese Communist Party, sits in a pot in which he has built himself a gruesome throne made out of bones. He holds high a red flag emblazoned not with the crossed sickle and hammer, symbols of the Party’s alliance with the workers and the peasants, but with the gun and the cleaver — the brutal weapons the pig must use to maintain his rule.