What we see is a crackdown on the internet, the media, academia and even science. Mr Xi has studied what happened to the Bolsheviks when Mikhail Gorbachev began to open up the Soviet system, and seems to have drawn a grim conclusion. While I don't attach much importance to the six bomb attacks on Party offices in Taiyuan on Wednesday, or the Uighur attack days earlier in Tiananmen Square, this will strengthen the hand of the hardliners. A few cycnics even claim that is the purpose of such terrorism.