In a sudden-death succession crisis, conflict among the leadership would probably be bounded rather than chaotic, because—as with Tiananmen—elites who lack their own power base share a strong incentive to preserve the system and prevent any contender from reaching out to public constituencies as Zhao Ziyang did, lest the whole system unravel.

The PLA purges under Xi reflect his consolidation of power rather than weakness, because from day one he has been laser-focused on suborning the military to himself, using anti-corruption as the key instrumental lever, and the people purged so far have been disposable figures outside his true inner circle whom he can make and break at will.

Xi's Taiwan policy has reached an intellectual dead end: the early Hu-Jintao-era Marxian approach (assuming economic integration would draw Taiwan into China's orbit like an apple falling off a tree) bore fruit through the 2015 Ma-Xi handshake, but after Tsai's election Xi pivoted to coercion, which combined with the Hong Kong crackdown has only pushed Taiwan politically further away.

Xi has more appetite for economic pain than the US does because he won't face voters complaining about an expensive Christmas, which is the decisive factor (more than the menu of available tools) in why the US lacks economic escalation dominance over China.

China may view the 2001 EP-3 incident as an effective model of crisis management rather than a cautionary tale: by holding the pilots for more than ten days and extracting an apology, Beijing could conclude that going dark and being opaque actually enhances its leverage and makes the Americans more cautious and eager to reach out.

China conducts foreign policy with a certain parochialism—it cares deeply about Russia as a strategic partner and about avoiding negative incentives, but cares little about the specific outcome in Ukraine, which itself limits the support it would extend; full all-in support (North Korean-style troops, fighter jets, war-footing drone production) was never in the cards because it wouldn't serve China's interests.

TSMC and access to Taiwanese chips rank very low in Xi's Taiwan decision calculus because he has confidence China will figure out chips over time and would simply scuttle the fabs if he invaded; what genuinely gives him pause is the broader economic cataclysm, since a full-scale invasion would gamble everything the party has achieved since Mao's death and could undo the party's legitimacy.

China's military modernization serves a dual purpose: not only preparation for actual conflict but also deterring US intervention by signaling that any Taiwan contingency will not be a 1996-style cakewalk, because China now has real capabilities to hold US assets in jeopardy in the Western Pacific.

By populating the Politburo Standing Committee with his old friends ('Xi's frat house'), Xi created an information problem for succession: he lacks personal relationships with the 50-something cohort from which a successor must come, so he will have to rely on his proteges' proteges ('bridge friends'), and because his inner-circle figures don't all like each other, they will jockey to position their own proteges, creating a frothier and more fraught political environment than the third term.

China's restrained response to US export controls during the Biden administration (e.g., the muted reaction to the October 2022 controls) was partly because parallel high-level diplomacy backstopped and constrained Chinese retaliation; when trade war 2.0 and Liberation Day came without that diplomatic cushion, China responded forcefully and immediately because it had spent four years methodically preparing countermeasures and was 'locked and loaded.'

A trusted inner-circle successor poses a dilemma because those Xi trusts are themselves old (with similar health risks and rival-attracting prominence), so he will likely need a much younger figure—'whippersnappers'—who must perform a delicate dance of appearing capable but not so distinguished, handsome, vigorous, or popular as to overshadow Xi, constrained further by the Xi Jinping Thought ideological cage.

Xi did not merely inherit an opening created by Hu-Jintao-era malaise but exercised unique agency, taking a 'crowbar' to an opening that existed because of party drift and an appetite for greater central control.

Xi's network can be understood as a two-tiered solar system: an inner 'asteroid belt' of figures bound by deep generational affinity (like Zhang Youxia, whose father served with Xi's father in the Fourth Field Army), and an outer tier of disposable figures who merely crossed paths with Xi in their careers and can be elevated or destroyed without cost.

Xi targeted the PLA first because as a princeling he understood the military is central to political power; rather than treating it as the last redoubt to shore up his position (as post-Deng leaders did), he attacked it first as a high-risk, high-reward move: mastering the military would let him dominate the entire system.

Xi's speed in moving against retired senior figures right away was strategically decisive: by targeting already-retired elders early, he changed everyone else's calculus, since mid-ranking and senior officers had to decide which horse to back—the retired guys or the young, vigorous leader who would make all decisions for the next 10-20 years.

By going after the top of the network (Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, who controlled all general officer promotions) rather than nibbling around the edges, Xi executed a 'decapitation move' that terrified everyone in the PLA, since all officers owed their promotions to that network, instantly conferring enormous authority.

When Xi reaches his fourth term staring down age 80 with the DPP still in power, he may have a deeper rethink of Taiwan policy; given his proven proclivity to shake up dynamics when frustrated (as in Hong Kong), he could give the more coercive options discussed in Washington a long and hard look—though this does not mean an appetite for a full-scale 'million-man swim' invasion.

The notion that the PLA has been 'professionalizing' over the past 20 years is misleading; the party does not want a Huntingtonian apolitical, politically neutral military, and Xi has explicitly emphasized that the PLA is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party as its primary mission, squashing any nascent debate about a national or state military.

The PLA fundamentally differs from a Western apolitical military because China lacks the cultural tradition and structural mechanisms (civilian Secretary of Defense, civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense) for civilian control; moreover, the PLA's self-conception is that it conquered China for the CCP, making it analogous to an armed wing of a political party whose original raison d'être is to keep that party in power.

Even remarkable concessions on the two chief sources of friction—Taiwan and technology competition—would not meaningfully attenuate the structural drivers of US-China competition; the current détente is more of a ceasefire than a deeper rapprochement, and good vibes from a summit would risk reviving illusory talk of détente.