Others donned hats, helmets or Halloween masks to fulfil the brief. But it's still a mistake to draw a straight line from Mao to Xi, Prof Karl argues, because it dismisses all that came in between - and the Chinese who dreamed or fought for a different country. He got caught in China's biggest and longest Covid lockdown. It was supposed to last four days, then another four, then another. Soon, the hotel staff stopped telling him. irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru That certainly seemed to be the case under Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao - corruption was on the rise and his authority was being openly ignored and even challenged. That was just the tip of an immense iceberg, says Richard McGregor, the former Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times. "Everything and everybody got a cut, but it got out of control," he adds. "It was becoming more like Suharto's Indonesia, where it was corroding the foundations of the system." "The problem is that the villages are razed. There's no place to hide. If we don't have the air superiority, it's going to be difficult. We're running out of planes, three or four were shot down last week. Zhao visited the protesters, urging them to call off their strike in what is now a historic speech: "We came too late. It's right for you to talk about us and criticise us any way you want... We're all old and it doesn't matter to us anymore. But you're still young, you should take care of yourself."