The death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a U.S.-Israeli missile strike on February 28 was widely discussed on Chinese social media. Much of this conversation was reflexive, using the event to comment on various issues in China, ranging from economic anxiety over the aftermath to the P.R.C.’s information environment and the settling of online scores. As has become traditional when a world leader suffers death or other misfortune, many Sinophone users of X and other platforms posted references to Malaysian singer Fish Leong’s ballad "Unfortunately Not You," a thinly veiled form of "praying for jade": that is, wishing it had happened to Xi Jinping instead.

Manya Koetse at Eye on Digital China offered a broad survey of Chinese online discussion of the attacks and noted, among many other themes, criticism of officially aligned commentators like former Global Times editor Hu Xijin: “When the first rumors of Khamenei’s death surfaced, [Hu] suggested the Iranian leader was probably keeping a low profile and preparing a public address that would be a major blow to the US and Israel, only to acknowledge the next day that Khamenei had indeed died. Later, Hu predicted that Iran’s new leader would be swiftly elected. As none of his predictions seem to be aging well, some netizens joked: ‘The only one who can beat Hu Xijin is the Hu Xijin of the next day.’” Several posts archived at CDT Chinese similarly mocked official media coverage and especially the confident but false predictions of nationalist commentators (also covered at China Global South Project). Undaunted, one such expert moved on, with mockery in hot pursuit, to claims that the targeted strike against Khamenei shows America’s declining conventional military capability.

Elsewhere, prolific blogger Xiang Dongliang pushed back against the popular view that the U.S. attack is primarily a grab for oil. While his explanation of Washington’s motives in terms of American primacy and prosperity does focus outside China, it is framed in terms of China’s own information environment: "Everyone knows," he writes, how the oil-grab narrative became so prevalent. That post was deleted, and mentions the deletion of another, earlier post on the topic. In a third piece, Xiang commented wryly on the erosion of Beijing’s international alliances: “The founding members of the ‘Best Friends Forever’ group chat were China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. Then Venezuela left the chat. Iran seems likely to follow. With Cuba’s fuel reserves running low, its days in the club are probably also numbered.” (This echoes a recent quip that Xi’s purges had left China’s Central Military Commission without enough active members to form a WeChat group.)

The WeChat post translated below was also censored. Its title parodies absurdly overconfident war propaganda with the claim that “the U.S. and Israel will lose so badly, they won’t even be able to find their own underwear”—the last word, 内衣 nèiyī, a nickname for Khamenei punning on the final characters of his Chinese name, 哈梅内伊 Hāméinèiyī. The piece never names Khamenei directly, in an apparent effort to evade keyword scans. (See our recent translation on Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai’s sentencing for another example of this censorship-evasion strategy.) Its scathing condemnation of authoritarian hypocrisy and myth-making has inescapable resonances in China, such as the numbing repetition of leaders’ “words of wisdom”; the gap between rhetoric and reality in elites’ solidarity with the public; and the frequent resort to censorship and propaganda instead of concrete solutions to matters of public concern. In that context, the exclusive use of pronouns sharpens the suggestion that much of the post refers not just to Khamenei, but to someone else. From Lao Xiao:

The news of his death came with a deluge of propaganda about him "dying in the line of duty," as Iranian authorities gave another demonstration of their consummate grasp of narrative manipulation.

"Why should my family and I take shelter while the people suffer bombardment?"

This maxim, supposedly spoken while he still lived, was held up as a model by the propaganda machinery and rebroadcast endlessly, serving as a solemn requiem for his death.

Muddled reports that four family members including his daughter and son-in-law were also killed in the attack deepened the air of tragedy even further.

"Refusing to take shelter," he "died in the line of duty," "sharing the masses’ fate." This sorrowful narrative was painstakingly constructed in an effort to portray him as a martyr who faced down the bombardment.

The rule of religious charlatans has always relied on the dark arts of bullshit. From staged photos of him sitting beatifically in a spartan office to heartwarming scenes of him shaking hands and greeting crowds of people, the idealized image projected by Iran’s official propaganda was always of a man "sharing the masses’ fate."

But in the demon-revealing mirror of reality, this was all a lie: as soon as the first shot was fired in the 2025 Israel-Iran conflict, he dove into a bunker 80 meters underground.

This "safehouse," strengthened with reinforced concrete and Kevlar fiber, could reportedly withstand a hit from a GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, though it couldn’t shield him from accusations of cowardice from those left outside.

He and his wife hid themselves away in a defensive installation 90-100 meters below ground, protected by a phalanx of Revolutionary Guards and a carefully hidden subterranean entrance that was figuratively unlocked by a report from former Italian intelligence officer Marco Mancini.

On the streets of Tehran, meanwhile, the ordinary people lived in terror of economic sanctions and the flames of war. How were they "sharing the masses’ fate"? On top of everything else, the authorities adopted a series of harsh measures like internet blackouts and security-force deployments beginning in January this year, arresting some 3,000 people and sentencing some of them to hanging, and establishing a draconian control regime comprising a "digital Iron Curtain + armed clearance."

Bullshit is the religious charlatans’ magic weapon: they try to spin their lies into a cloak of authority in the hope that illusory worship will make the masses forget their real suffering.

To a great extent, his whole life was built on bullshit.

From "to question the leader is to question Allah’s plan" to "neither East nor West, only the Islamic Republic"; from "missile cities across the nation, carrier-killers are in position" to "we will surely make the enemy kneel before us"; from claiming that Iran had "vanquished Israel" and "given the United States a resounding slap in the face," the tone was resolute, the heroic rhetoric soaring.

With bullshit like this, he responded to real crises like economic stagnation, precarious livelihoods, and social contradictions by folding them all into a narrative framework of "sacred struggle."

But behind the bullshit was a cowering and quaking "rule from backstage." He’d hardly shown his face in public since the end of 2025, and carried out day-to-day administration through his third son Masoud, with the chain of command dwindling to a single human go-between.

This state of seclusion was less about keeping a low profile than about extreme fear for his personal safety.

The Iranian people aren’t stupid, but even a fool could see how the strike took him out, together with a bunch of other senior officials.

He simply thought that as long as indirect talks were underway with the American imperialists, there was no risk of sudden attack by the U.S. and Israel. He wasn’t in his deep bunker because daytime seemed relatively safe; he convened senior officials for an emergency meeting in his official residence above ground in Tehran; and because someone leaked his location, he was hit with a precision strike.

But the propaganda apparatus rose to the occasion, depicting him as a "fearless warrior," as if all those days and nights hiding in a bunker never happened.

They want the masses to believe that "the living embodiment of Allah" bleeds red, just like you. But do they really share the masses’ fate? What we do know is that the arrangements made for their safety had nothing in common with the circumstances endured by ordinary people. They leveraged talk of “the people’s fate” to prop up their own mythology.

This gulf is absolutely typical of authoritarian governments: using symbolic sacrifice to reinforce their own sacred status, and physical isolation to ensure the safety of those in power, while the lives and deaths of the masses are no more than bargaining chips to protect the leaders’ own rule.

He needed to appear to have died at his post without fear or complaint. Ultimately, an elderly "bunker boy" can’t maintain religious authority and moral legitimacy, but a martyr who "shares the people’s adversity" can become an effective tool for rallying the public and stirring up hatred of the enemy.

Now he’s dead, but the bullshit parade marches on. Saying that he "tragically died in his office" tries to dress up his death as a glorious and heroic sacrifice, inflaming public hostility [toward the U.S. and Israel] and sustaining the regime’s legitimacy.

He did die in the line of duty in his office, "sharing the fate" of the masses for once not out of conscious choice, but in what looks like a kind of cosmic joke.

A "perfect death" is a satisfactory final brushstroke for the great and towering image of a martyr who served his country till the end instead of, as was whispered, hiding in a bunker.

The bullshit got him killed, and now it outlives him.

Even at the end, one last dollop was needed as a final punctuation mark to deceive himself and others.

This familiar formula, from play-acting at "sharing the people’s adversity" to the carved epitaph of "dedicating his entire life," is how the machinery of power keeps running on nothing but lies and inertia.

Strictly speaking, it was his own mythology that killed him. Now his successors in that myth are trying to use his words to inflate an even bigger bubble of bullshit: that in the end, the U.S. and Israel will lose so badly, they won’t even be able to find their own underwear. [Chinese]