A senior Chinese Communist Party official casts a suspicious eye towards an unmarked van lurking outside his building, as he rushes in and shuts the door. Inside his room, he picks up a framed photograph of his wife and their two children clinging to her before turning his gaze to footage of the National People’s Congress playing on TV. “As I rose the ranks of the party, I watched as those above me were cast aside,” he narrates in Mandarin. “But now, I realize my fate is just as precarious as