maxglute 7 hours ago

It's july / august, summer lull for PRC political news, gov officials (including Xi) take breaks / reduce activity around now, no major political meetings or events. So queue retarded western Chinahands with helping dose from FLG tier actors doing their annual "palace intrigue" wank AKA Xi health / Xi power rumor cycle because there's nothing else to "report". Like clockwork.

E: I've actually never bothered to quantify pre LLM, but here's a lazy/cursory chatgpt chart of Xi public appearances, and O_O at pattern. TFW Xi gets stage 10 cancer in July, August but full remission by September. Make of it what you will.

https://imgur.com/a/QZi1tWD

armchairhacker 7 hours ago

> Hi there, thank you for your message.

> I am currently out of office on a two-week vacation. I will be returning to the office on June 5th. Until then, I will not have access to my emails.

> Kind regards,

> Xi Jinping. President, Chinese Communist Party. China

alephnerd 9 hours ago

There has been plenty of speculation about this for a couple months right now - especially given the infighting in the CMC. I have some speculation around it as well, but it is essentially unsubstantiated and I have very mixed feelings about some of sources.

We will see what happens in the Fourth Plenum. If Xi resigns from one of his positions during the Plenum, then that is indication of a changing of the winds. If not, then this purging within the CMC and MOFA can be viewed as cleaning ship and solidifying primacy before potentially offensive action.

That said, this is all Beidaihe-ology until then.

At this point, the only outside commentator I trust to analyze Chinese elite politics is probably Nakazawa Katsuji at Nikkei [0]

[0] - https://www.nikkei.com/topics/17101600

  • 0x445442 8 hours ago

    Or it could be the Western Spin Doctors wishful thinking because of this

    https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news-selections/wor...

    • alephnerd 8 hours ago

      Maybe, but I tend to trust 中沢克二. He has a fairly successful track record on reporting on Chinese elite politics, and Japanese reporting on China is fairly high quality given the economic interdependence along with naval tensions between the two and certain irredentist sentiments around Ryukyu.

      That said, stuff is absolutely different in the CMC and MOFA today - I don't think similar churn at that level has been seen since the 1980s.

      That said, this should NOT be construed as "Chinese Collapse". That said, this is exactly how succession works in authoritarian countries. We saw similar confusion in China during the 2009-12 period [0]. Fourth plenums be wonky

      [0] - https://research.nus.edu.sg/eai/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/B...