10 Facts About Cai Xia

Cai Xia is a Chinese dissident and scholar of political theory.

Cai Xia has taught high-ranking members and officials of the Chinese Communist Party, including leading provincial and municipal administrators and cabinet-level ministers, and is a retired professor of the CCP Central Party School.

Cai Xia is an advocate for political liberalisation in China and has been critical of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping.

Cai Xia was expelled from the CCP in August 2020 for criticising the CCP under Xi's rule.

Cai Xia was born in October 1952 in Changzhou, Jiangsu province and was raised in a family with close ties to the military, in which she served from 1969 to 1978 before joining the CCP in 1982.

In 1980, Cai Xia became vice president of the factory's labor union and director of the family planning office.

For some years she continued to believe in the ability of the CCP to solve its problems through reform, but her hopes gradually evaporated after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and implemented measures that Cai Xia saw as going in the wrong direction.

Cai Xia, who was residing in the United States at the time of the expulsion, told The New York Times that she had contemplated resigning from the CCP since much earlier, and welcomed no longer being a party member, saying that it had allowed her to regain freedom.

On 23 August 2020, in an interview with CNN, Cai Xia expressed support for the US government's ban on Huawei and proposed that the US government impose sanctions on CCP officials, while asking the international community to prevent the CCP from infiltrating international organizations.

Cai Xia has urged the US to abandon its "naive" hopes of engagement with Beijing, while warning that China's leadership is more fragile than it has appeared.