When the Wall Street Journal published an essay predicting the demise of China’s Communist party last year, the reaction of officials in the foreign ministry in Beijing was immediate and predictable. According to people familiar with the exchange, they told a senior editor at the newspaper to “take it down now”.

The Journal’s website had been blocked in China since the previous summer, ostensibly for its coverage of the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. So in order to read the article, “The Coming Chinese Crackup”, the angry diplomats would have required a virtual private network (VPN) tool to circumvent China’s Great Firewall.

Chinese officials use VPNs all the time to evade their own internet censorship apparatus with little hint of embarrassment. For David Shambaugh, professor of international affairs at George Washington University and author of the offending essay, such hypocrisy is further evidence that the party’s embrace of “hard authoritarianism” has put it on a path to its own extinction.