Xi, like Gorbachev, is a figure wanting to accomplish great deeds in reforming an ailing system. And like the last Soviet leader, Xi has started something he cannot control. He has chosen to attack corruption, but this ill is so embedded in the Chinese communist system, that vigorous anticorruption efforts cannot be managed. Unfortunately for Xi, he has created great expectations in society and even in elite circles. So he cannot stop his campaign, and that ultimately means any deal he may have stuck with the old tigers will surely come undone, one way or another.

A fragile political system cannot contain the willful men who are now fighting.

Politics now may not be as brutish as they were in the early years of the People’s Republic, but they do not allow a leader to accept a draw. A leader can either win or lose, especially someone like Xi who has already started what looks like a war of political extermination.

With the stakes so high these days, no one can look weak, least of all the general secretary of the Communist Party. Xi initiated a fight to the finish, and he must see it to the end. Unlike constitutional systems where institutional mechanisms restrain impulses, China’s brand of authoritarianism rewards the worst behavior in times of stress. Xi’s winner-takes-all politics has a nasty logic he cannot escape.

In these circumstances, Guo Wenliang of Zhongshan University in Guangzhou thinks “the risk of a joint counterattack by the tigers is very, very great” because senior officials will not wait to let Xi pick them off one at a time. And Xi cannot afford to wait for them to attack.

Xi Jinping, a strongman in the making, has already changed Chinese Communist politics—and for better or worse, there is no going back for him.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China.  Follow him on Twitter: @GordonGChang.

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