The markets have shown China’s leader Xi Jinping that embracing authoritarian leadership and surrounding oneself with  obsequious “yes” men tends not to encourage investor confidence.
On Monday, the stock prices of some of China’s leading outward-looking companies like Alibaba and Tencent sunk by 11 percent in a single day. From Oct. 24 to Oct. 25, EST, the Hang Seng Index graph looked like an Olympic skiing slalom course, dropping an incredible 1,200 points, from about 16,200 to 15,000—nearly 7.4 percent—in just 19 hours.
We know who Xi Jinping is. He’s a totalitarian who sees himself as an emperor; we see him as a thug. His power move to have his personal bodyguard forcibly remove former party general secretary Hu Jintao from the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) just before the vote to extend Xi’s term beyond the traditional two five-year terms has led some to speculate that Hu was set to protest the measure and Xi censored him proactively. Efforts by China to censor searches for Hu Jintao’s name in Internet searches would seem to indicate something political was amiss, not the “illness” cover story proffered by the CCP to curious foreign journalists….