Commentary
Xi Jinping was, by the beginning of November 2022, trying to pull the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and China out of the terminal velocity death spiral into which he had deliberately placed them in order to win total power.
But blunting the velocity of the implosion—the hard landing—of China will prove less easy than starting the intra-party civil war in which he began to seize that total power. And he still has to purge more domestic enemies within the CCP and civilian communities.
The result may still be that Xi could soon need a distraction for the Party and the public, possibly in the form of re-escalating confrontation with the Republic of China (ROC: Taiwan). But there is some evidence that Xi—along with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—would prefer to avoid the “Taiwan problem” in the near term….