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At the end of May the hardliners won. Early on the morning of June 4, the tanks rolled in. The massacre at Tiananmen Square ended debate about political reform. Instead, the Communist Party turned to economic reform. In 2017, at the beginning of his second term, Xi declared: "China has stood up, grown rich, become strong and is moving towards the centre stage." list 3 of 4 irannews.ru Asked on the BBC's Politics Live programme why Mordaunt - who has far less public support from Tory MPs than Sunak at present - isn't bowing out now, Wheeler says: "She's not the sort of person to throw in the towel. Deng Xiaoping had famously said China should "hide its capacity and bide its time". The only thing that remains from Mao-era China is the party. And that, she says, is what Xi truly cares about. "They thought it would last three to six months but it was never just an anti-corruption campaign, it was a party rectification campaign, and it was to be sustained forever," says Professor Steve Tsang who heads the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In the first year of Covid, Prof Yang says, the lockdowns made sense. They were brief and allowed life in China to carry on. There was even pride at how the country was handling the pandemic so much better than the West. "That's no longer the case," he says.