Thread by @TheDailyMao

Li Peng is dead, and with it the krysha is gone for a lot of these vested interests

https://twitter.com/damienics/status/1355673521557483526

Back in 2010 I had lunch with someone whose father was in the power sector and affiliated with Li. Don't remember much except her casually saying 几个亿算啥，谁家没有几个亿啊 in a conversation about the price of Australian real estate

This is why that longer telegram makes no sense to me. The CPC was rotting from the inside pre 2013 and everyone with power inside it could see the end was nigh if they continued down that course

The real flaw was Western elites conflating the CPC curbing economic special interests and centripetal sociopolitical forces as an assault on 'engagement' or the status quo world order

This gratuitous pushback - exemplified by HRCs private comments to PRC elites in 2015 and 16 - created a crapload of paranoia inside the CPC about Western intentions which turned the CPC from suspicious post the 2010 SCS mess into something that was much more hostile by 2016

Most nations, China included, are paranoid of foreign powers stoking elite division and defection. That the US is now unequivocally pushing this in a semi official policy paper will make diplomacy arguably harder under Biden than Trump

https://mobile.twitter.com/LipeEstevao/status/1355653463162675200

The correct historical analogy for this dimension of the China-US conflict, BTW, would be the Hundred Years' War caused by England seeking feudal rights in France, and France's struggle to unify the country and assert sovereignty

And as the name of that war suggests, we are in for a long, long, long conflict if the US continues down this path.

/end