Empirically, based on interpretive analyses of the Chinese party-state’s official documents and publications, this research provides a revisionist remapping of the trajectory of Chinese high politics since Hu Jintao and a new hypothesis on the origin of Xi Jinping’s strongman rule, and shows that Bo Xilai’s Maoist populism in Chongqing was part of a “two-line struggle” at the top. The conservative pushback against China’s reformers had been gradually gaining momentum during Hu Jintao’s early years and reached high tide around the Party’s leadership succession in 2012. Thus, an “evolutionary” view of Bo’s political campaigning emerges, suggesting that Bo’s political orientation shifted in response to the changing political wind—i.e. growing conservatism amid intense left-right contestation, and was by no means a premeditated plan Bo simply rolled out upon his arrival in Chongqing, as conventionally believed. Chongqing under Bo experienced major policy adjustment three times and went through four different phases: reformism, leftism, Maoism, and finally, opportunistic hedging. Having decided to side with the Chinese leftists, Bo adopted quintessentially Maoist strategies—mass mobilization against the people’s “enemies”, the nature of which was essentially populist. Theoretically, the Chinese case of populism shows that populism can emerge even where representative democracy and electoral institutions are nonexistent. Populism under full authoritarianism takes the form of top-down populist mobilization when ruling elites or factions struggle over power. What is taken for granted in an electoral/democratic setting—i.e. open political opposition—may occasionally become possible when the unity of authoritarian leaders is shattered by an internal power struggle. Adopting a populist strategy for power struggle—i.e. spreading antagonistic discourses of us versus them and publicizing the mass support for populist leaders, autocrats necessarily have to “go public.” However, in the age of popular sovereignty, one fundamental challenge to authoritarian rulers is how to handle the tension between the de facto “ruler-above-people” relationship and the de jure “people-above-ruler” principle. Whenever autocrats invoke the spirit of Vox Populi and mobilize the masses in a power struggle against political enemies, populism confronts authoritarian rulers with the thorny issue of how to put the awakened democratic ideal back into dormancy.