No, China doesn't plan 1000 years ahead

I was writing a post about the economics of AI, but my elderly disabled pet rabbit had a bit of a health emergency, so the AI post will have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, I know you’d like something to read in the morning, so here’s a repost from a few years back.

The big news out of China this past week wasn’t about electric cars or semiconductors or real estate. It was about Xi Jinping purging his top general (and close friend) Zhang Youxia, along with another top general named Liu Zhenli. No one knows exactly why this happened — I speculated about a coup plot in my weekly roundup, but most analysts don’t talk about that possibility. Here are three analyses that I found pretty interesting:

1. Jon Czin (interviewed by Jordan Schneider) thinks Xi probably purged Zhang out of pure paranoia — Zhang was powerful and had a lot of people loyal to him, and Xi may have simply been afraid that Zhang could turn into a rival.

2. Youlun Nie thinks Zhang simply wasn’t doing a good job getting the Chinese military ready for an invasion of Taiwan (and that this fact had been exposed by Zhang’s rivals, who were purged earlier). Xi may have simply decided to clean house and start afresh.

3. K. Tristan Tang thinks Zhang simply didn’t want to get ready to invade Taiwan so quickly, and that Xi removed Zhang for resisting his orders.

In the end we can’t really know. But it opens up the possibility that Xi is entering his “lion in winter” phase. Xi isn’t an organization-builder, like Mao, Lenin, Elon Musk, etc. He’s an organization-dominator, like Stalin — a guy who rises through the ranks of a big existing power structure by being very good at patronage, backstabbing, and various other power games.

Guys like this are always incredibly paranoid, because they had to be in order to reach the top. And as they age and start to slow down, they often get even more paranoid that they’re about to be overthrown — both because they’re a weaker target, and because everyone starts fighting over the succession. At 72, Xi is already several years older than Joseph Stalin was when he descended into his terminal paranoia.

The rest of the world may thus catch a break. Xi has no