Cai Xia (, born October 1952) is a Chinese dissident and scholar of political theory. She has taught high-ranking members and officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including leading provincial and municipal administrators and cabinet-level ministers, and is a retired professor of the CCP Central Party School. She is an advocate for political liberalisation in China and has been critical of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping. She was expelled from the CCP in August 2020 for criticising the CCP under Xi's rule. Since 2019, she has resided in the United States in exile. Career Cai Xia was born in October 1952 in Changzhou, Jiangsu province and was raised in a family with close ties to the military, in which she served from 1969 to 1978 before joining the CCP in 1982. In 1980, Cai Xia became vice president of the factory's labor union and director of the family planning office. In 1984 she participated in a two-year program in Marxist theory and CCP history at the Suzhou Municipal Party School. Eventually she turned to work in academia, earning a doctorate in law at the Central Party School in 1998. Specializing in the fields of party ideology and party building of the party state (with "party" referring to the CCP), she published over 60 scholarly papers between 1989 and 2020. As of 2012, she was a professor at the Party-building Center of the Central Party School, retiring the same year after 15 years of service. According to an August 2020 article in The Guardian, Cai began doubting the party orthodoxy in the early 2000s, when she assisted then-CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin with the drafting of his Three Represents theory. By that time she was frequently present in Chinese news media, advocating for liberal views including the opening of the CCP to more businesspeople and professionals. Her faith in the Communist Party was shaken considerably after a trip to Spain where she studied the Spanish transition to democracy and comparing it to China, noting that Mao and Franco had died at similar times yet Franco's successors had quickly and successfully transitioned to a stable democracy while Mao's successors had created a muddled hybrid economy and completely ignored political reform. For some years she continued to believe in the ability of the CCP to solve its problems through reform, but her hopes gradually evaporated after Xi Jinping came to power in