From Palace Coup to Economic Collapse: Xi Jinping’s Six Possible Endings | Digging into China

Hi, I'm Dong Xiong. Welcome to Digging into China, where we take a deep dive into what's really happening in China and share some unique insights. Last time we did two things. First, we figured out the four layers of pressure Xi Jinping is facing right now. Second, we opened the death vows of seven dictators, then broke down their five defensive walls and the hard-to-notice cracks inside each one. At the end of the last episode, I left one cliffhanger. On the night in 1976, when Ye Jianying crashed the Gang of Four, before he made his move, he first made sure of one thing. In January 2026, when Xi Jinping moved against Zhang Youxia, he quietly did something of exactly the same nature. Between these two events, there is a clear pattern. This reveals how real power changes have actually happened in the history of the Chinese Communist Party, and what it might look like the next time it happens. In this episode, we are going to lay out that pattern. This episode mainly does three things. First, we will break down one by one the six most likely endings for Xi Jinping. For each one, the conditions that would trigger it, the historical examples, and the real soil in today's China that could make it happen. Second, we will dare to rank these six paths to see which one is most likely and which one is almost impossible. Third, we will talk about his ending, but more importantly about what will happen to China after he is gone, and what will happen to the world. All right, let's get started. But before we do, I still need to say one important thing first. These six paths are not mutually exclusive. They can overlap, they can trigger each other, and they can unexpectedly flow together at some historical turning point. An economic crisis can open a window for a coup. A defeat in the Taiwan Strait war can trigger both economic collapse and a coup at the same time. And a coup afterwards can be packaged as a natural death. In the end, all these paths in different forms may point to the same final destination. Understanding this is the key to understanding the whole analysis. So let's begin with the path that has the lowest probability but is the first one many people think of. This road is almost completely blocked, but almost is not the same as completely. After Khomeini was killed by a strike, a lot of discussion spread online. Who's next? I want to give a clear-headed answer. In the foreseeable future, the chance that outside military forces directly assassinate Xi Jinping is extremely low, close to zero. The reason is simple, China has nuclear weapons. We already talked about this last time, but there is one detail worth going deeper into. China does not just have nuclear warheads, it has a full triad nuclear strike system. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and air-based nuclear weapons. Even if the United States destroys all known land-based nuclear sites, China's strategic nuclear submarines can still strike from the depths of the ocean. This is not just paper deterrence, it is a real second strike capability that actually exists. Moreover, China has a fundamental difference from Iran or Venezuela. It is not only a permanent member of the UN Security Council, it is also a core node in the global economic system. Launching a military strike against China's top leader would mean declaring the complete collapse of the current international order. Even the United States in the Trump era was not willing to pay that price. But there is another detail here that I want you to think about carefully. How was Khamenei found? The answer is simple. The U.S. and Israel found reliable informants. On the morning of February 28, informants inside Iran's intelligence network gave precise information that Khamenei would attend a high-level security meeting. Without that informant, no matter how accurate the missiles, it could not have hit the target. How was Saddam found? The same way, through informants. The U.S. military's intelligence network in the Tikrit area finally located the farm and the hole where he was hiding. At that moment, the most important thing was not American technology, but the person who sold him out. So what does this logic mean for China? What truly decides whether an outside decapitation strike can succeed has never been the weapons, it has always been that person on the inside, the one willing to give the exact location. And Xi Jinping clearly understands this with extreme clarity. He purges off the intelligence system and his personal security detail has already been pushed to the highest level since the founding of the People's Republic. His public schedule is one of the most tightly guarded of any national leader in the world. However, Iran's revolutionary guard was also one of the most closed intelligence systems in the world. After the 12-day war in June 2025, they carried out a large-scale counter-espionage purge, thinking they had plugged the holes. Then, 8 months later, Khamenei still died in his own office. Is Zhongnanhai safer than Tehran? Maybe it is, but safer is not the same as absolutely safe. So between almost impossible and completely impossible, where is the crack? There is one scenario worth taking seriously, battlefield decapitation during a Taiwan Strait war. If a real war breaks out across the Taiwan Strait and enters actual armed conflict, the logic of war changes all the normal calculations of peacetime. In wartime, targeted strikes against China's military command system become normal acts of war, not assassinations in peacetime. In theory, the command center where Xi Jinping is located would become a legitimate military target. This is one of the reasons why Taiwan is one of the biggest gambles Xi Jinping has set for himself. It is not only because of the political collapse that would follow defeat, but because the war itself would put him in direct physical danger that he would never face in peacetime. Let's look at the probability assessment for outside decapitation. Close to zero in peacetime. But in wartime, it jumps from near zero to a level that deserves serious attention. And the key variable in this path is never the weapons, it is always that person on the inside. Taiwan is the biggest trap Xi Jinping has set for himself. Many people think this trap has only one exit, the assumption that the war is lost. But actually, it has two exits, and both lead into the abyss. Let's talk first about the scenario of losing. In history, military defeat has been the fastest catalyst for regime collapse. The crushing defeat in the 1905 Russia-Japanese war directly triggered the first Russian revolution. In 1917, the continued bleeding of World War I sent Tsar Nicholas II to the scaffold. In 1982, after the defeat in the Falklands War, Argentina's military government under Gattielli fell apart within months, and he himself ended up in prison. The impact of a Taiwan Strait defeat on Xi Jinping would be even more severe than these cases, because he has defined this as the historic mission of the Chinese nation, as a task that his generation must complete, and as the ultimate proof of the Chinese Communist Party's right to rule. If this mission ends in failure, his entire political narrative would collapse from its foundation. It would not be just the failure of one policy, it would be the bankruptcy of the whole ideological system. What is even more fatal is that once the war starts, the world's harshest economic sanctions would immediately kick in. The double blow of military defeat plus economic collapse would open the window for a coup with unprecedented force. Those elites who had stayed silent out of fear would face a new calculation, continue to cling to a failing leader as the ship sinks, or cut ties in time. History's clear, most of the time, they choose to cut ties. But what if he wins? Many people think that winning would solve everything. Actually, this is not the case. This is a counter-intuitive analysis, but history supports it. Suppose the Taiwan Strait war ends with China military taking control of Taiwan and Xi Jinping fulfills his historic mission. First, international sanctions would immediately come into effect and would not automatically lift when the war ends. Exports would fall off a cliff, foreign investment would withdraw, and technological blockades would tighten further. The post-war economic collapse might be even harder to handle than after a defeat, because it would come with a fatal psychological gap. We won. So why are we still so poor? This kind of confusion often turns into anger faster than expected. Second, a Taiwan that is militarily occupied but whose people completely refuse to accept it, would become China's version of a long-term quagmire. Guerrilla warfare, cyber warfare, and continued international support would turn military victory into a political nightmare. Third, the mood inside the military would be complicated. The generals who lost comrades and bore huge pressure in the war might not feel gratitude towards the decision-maker, but resentment instead, because he was the one who pushed them into this war. Fourth, and most profound, after victory, Xi Jinping's historic mission would be completed. Then what? He would still have no successor, still have no exit mechanism, and would still need to find a new narrative to justify keeping power. A dictator who has completed his historical mission will either slowly grow old in his position or look for the next big gamble. And every new big gamble means new risks and new possible endings. Taiwan is a trap, Xi Jinping set for himself, not his salvation. Probability assessment for a Taiwan straight war. Serious strategic analysts estimate the chance of it breaking out in the next 10 years at between 20 and 50 percent. But there is almost no disagreement on one point. Once it happens, it would be the strongest catalyst among all ending paths. Whether China wins or loses, it would open the gates to all the other previously closed paths in a very short time. This ending has no gunfire, no historical single day, no clear turning point that can be neatly narrated. It is a slow variable, a grey rhino moving slowly in the dark. Everyone knows it is there, but it moves slowly enough that people always choose not to face it directly. But slow does not mean harmless. In history, economic collapse has often killed dictators more thoroughly than military defeat, because it eats away at the very foundation of the entire system. The collapse of the Soviet Union is a textbook case. Gorbachev did not die in a coup or in war. The regime he presided over died from an economic system that could no longer be sustained, and from the political chain reaction triggered when he tried to fix it. Falling oil price, the excessive cost of the arms race, and the systemic failure of the planned economy all came together, causing a nuclear power to fall apart by itself without any outside military strike. There is an even more direct case. Suharto in 1998, he ruled Indonesia for 32 years and built a patronage network centered on military and family interests. It looked rock-solid. Then the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit. The Indonesian currency crashed, GDP plunged, and inflation once reached 80%. People took to the streets, student movements swept the country. The military chose not to open fire, and Suharto resigned in May 1998. Notice the most critical mechanism in this case. It was not the economic collapse itself that brought Suharto down, but the way the collapse destroyed the network of interests that held up his power, turning the military from loyalists into bystanders. When the military is no longer willing to shoot, any dictator is just an unprotected old man. Now let's look at the The most representative example is China's real estate sector. It is not just one industry, it is the main container of the wealth of China's middle class, carrying the entire future hopes of countless families. This container is leaking. What is being lost is not just money, but the belief in the Chinese dream that several generations built with their sweat. The breaking of this belief will turn into political anger in ways that are hard to predict. It may not mean people taking to the streets, but it will certainly seep into a re-evaluation of the whole system. China's thousands of local governments carry hidden debts in the scale of tens of trillions. These debts depend on land sales revenue to be repaid. Land prices are tightly linked to real estate. When real estate goes down, land revenue shrinks, and local governments start to lose the ability to pay civil servants' salaries, maintain infrastructure, or deliver social benefits. A government that cannot pay wages cannot maintain obedience. China's young generation was sent to university by their parents, believing education was the ticket to a better life. But they are not hitting the cold reality of the job market on an unprecedented scale. Terms like lying flat, letting it rot, are not just internal slang. They are a generation expressing in indirect ways a clear political attitude. In history, the main force of every movement that truly changed a regime has been educated young people who had expectations that were then systematically destroyed. When the economy keeps getting worse, military generals will start to recalculate. Does my loyalty to a leader who is leading the country into the abyss serve my interests? Local officials will start to think, is it worth continuing to endorse a central government that cannot solve economic problems? Business elites will start to think, should I continue to support this system or quietly move my assets out? This is exactly the Chinese version of the military becoming bystanders in the Suharto case. As long as the pillars stand, the dictator stands. But the moment those pillars begin to shake, the whole structure's fragility will be fully exposed in a very short time. Of course, the Chinese Communist Party is aware of this. Its response strategy is to turn economic problems into a nationalist narrative. China is being suppressed and blocked by the West. We must grit our teeth and hold on. This kind of narrative can work for a while. But nationalist narratives have an expiration date. When people start to see their children's future truly disappearing, when they start to calculate whether their pensions will arrive on time, nationalist enthusiasm will cool faster than ever before. The chance that an economic crisis turns into a serious political crisis in the next five to ten years is the highest among all paths. But the chance that it alone leads to Xi Jinping's personal ending is relatively low. Its more likely role is to act as a trigger and accelerator for other paths, especially the one we are about to discuss next. All right, now we have finally reached the core part of this episode. First, I want to state a historical fact that surprises many people. In the 100-year history of the Chinese Communist Party, there has never been a successful internal coup carried out by force of arms. The closest thing was the Lin Biao incident. According to the official account, Lin Biao tried to launch an armed coup, failed, then fled, and his plan crashed in Mongolia, killing everyone on board. However, the truth of this event remains a mystery to this day. We simply do not know whether Lin Biao was really planning a coup or he sensed that Mao Zedong was about to purge him and choose to flee in advance. But no matter which interpretation you take, one thing is clear. Even in the extremely chaotic political environment of the Cultural Revolution, a man who held heavy military power and stood second in the party and the state could not successfully launch a coup, and could not even complete his escape. The reason was the Chinese Communist Party's built-in defenses against the coups. The party came to power through armed struggle, so its founders had a deep, instinctive vigilance against armed coups. Mao Zedong established the system of the party commands the gun. The military is loyal to the party, not to any individual general. Any attempt to use the military to overthrow the top leadership must first solve a logical paradox. I want to use the party's name to oppose the party's highest leader. This paradox is almost impossible to resolve in peacetime. Successive leaders have deliberately maintained a balance between different military factions, making it impossible for any single general to control enough military force on his own to launch a coup. To launch a coup, one must first build an alliance. And building an alliance inevitably involves secret contacts with many people. Multiple secret contacts means extremely high risk of exposure. In a system where the intelligence apparatus is everywhere, this risk is enough to make most potential plotters give up. In a system without independent courts, without democratic elections, and without a transparent mechanism for handing over power, there are no clear answers to questions like who launches the coup and who takes over afterwards. This uncertainty fills potential participants with doubt when they calculate the gains. What will I get after the coup? These three mechanisms are the main reasons why coups have never succeeded in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. However, I still believe that an internal elite coup is the most likely violent path among all of Xi Jinping's possible endings, because his own actions are systematically dismantling these three mechanisms. Let's start with the first mechanism, that logical paradox. Using the party's name to oppose the party's highest leader was already hard to justify. But Xi Jinping has pushed the degree to which the party equals himself to an unprecedented depth. For example, writing Xi Jinping's thought into the constitution, abolishing term limits, and deepening the personality cult, this looks like it is strengthening the paradox, making opposing Xi Jinping even harder, because it becomes the same as opposing the party. But history is not playing out according to that logic. In the last episode, we talked about Ceausescu. His personality cult was also pushed to the peak. Yet it only took four days from a rally of 100,000 cheering people to his execution in a military camp toilet. Because when a personality cult is pushed to the extreme, the obedience performed out of fear makes the ruler mistakenly believe that the cheers are genuine. This is the same risk Xi Jinping faces now. The deeper the personality cult, the harder it is for the leader to tell whether the loyalty he sees is real allegiance or just a performance of fear. When a critical event appears, the performers can stop performing in an instant. Now the second mechanism, factional balance. Xi Jinping used anti-corruption campaigns to carry out the largest purge of the military since the founding of the country. Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong fell, He Beidong and Miao Hua fell, and the rocket force was almost entirely cleaned out. He tried to build a Xi family army system centered on himself. This sounds very safe, but remember the lesson of Gaddafi. Gaddafi built a security system more personal than anyone else's. He used members of his own hometown tribe to form his personal guard. In theory, the people least likely to betray him. Yet when the critical moment came, that absolutely loyal guard could not stop him from being dragged out of a drainage pipe. There was only one reason. Their loyalty was built on fear and interest, not on real belief. Once the calculation of fear and interest changed, loyalty flipped. Now the third mechanism, uncertainty of gains. Xi Jinping abolished the term limits, has no successor, and has hollowed out the framework of collective leadership. Once he is gone, the question of who takes over is more open than ever before. For a sufficiently powerful, potential coup leader, this openness is an attraction, not an obstacle. As long as the coup succeeds, he only needs to push this one person aside to redefine the direction of the entire empire. Remember Milosevic whom we talked about last time. The person who betrayed him, the new government's prime minister, Jinjiqi, was someone who grew up inside his system and had received protection from him. But Jinjiqi acted only after Milosevic had already lost, had already resigned, and was already on the way down. When he was still at the height of his power, no one moved against him. Because at that time, the gains from loyalty were greater than the gains from betrayal. This is the pattern. No one moves against a dictator when he is at his strongest. Every successful internal action happens only after visible, sufficiently large cracks have appeared in the dictator's power. Alright, now let's talk again about that pattern, the cliffhanger we left at the end of the last episode. In 1976, how did Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying crush the Gang of Four? Not by using the regular army, not by a vote in the political bureau, but by using the 8341 unit, the Central Security Regiment, the internal guard force specifically responsible for protecting the top party leaders. Before he acted, Ye Jianying secretly confirmed which side the internal guard force was on, and only after confirming did he give the signal. The whole operation did not move a single regular army unit and did not fire a single shot. It was completed in one night. This was the most successful palace coup in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Its success lay precisely in the fact that it bypassed the regular army and directly controlled the internal guard forces in the capital. Now compare this logic with the Zhang Youxia event. What did Xi Jinping do before he moved against Zhang Youxia? He brought Chen Yuan from the Shanghai armed police to take over the Beijing garrison command. He was replaying Ye Jianying's 1976 move, only in the opposite direction. Ye Jianying used the internal guard to overthrow those in power. Xi Jinping is using the internal guard to prevent himself from being overthrown. This shows that he is very clear about the existence of this past. He knows the real threat does not come from the regular army, but from the force that controls the streets of Beijing and the gates of Zhongnanhai. But there is a profound irony here. This very move of his exposed his deepest fear. He did not trust the original Beijing garrison command. He believed that the original force had connections with Zhang Youxia. Xi Jinping had to replace it before he dared to act. This means that before he moved against Zhang Youxia, he was not confident about the very force in Beijing responsible for protecting his safety. He did not know whether if Zhang Youxia moved first, that force would protect him or open the gates. An absolute commander-in-chief who controls the military still had to replace the head of the capital's internal guard before arresting his own trusted general. After the Zhang Youxia event, Professor Pei Mingxin of Claremont McKenna College in California said this, Zhang Youxia's force shows that Xi Jinping's one-man rule has entered a new stage. Institutional trust has completely disappeared. He no longer governs through stable alliances, but relies on endless cycles of political purges to maintain power. Where will this endless cycle of purges finally reach? Now let me describe a concrete scenario of the most likely internal action. The scenario happens after some triggering event. It could be a Taiwan Strait war, a serious financial crisis, or a visible health problem with Xi Jinping that the elite class can sense. In short, it is some critical event that makes people start thinking, he might really be finished. After this critical event, a small circle begins to form. This most likely make-up is a few Politburo standing committee members plus one or two key military generals. They do not use electronic communication because they know those channels are monitored. They rely on face-to-face contact during formal meetings and official activities, and on an extremely limited number of trusted intermediaries. Their discussion would begin with a veiled question, what should we do about the future of the party? What about the country? Can we really continue like this? This kind of logic has appeared with a striking consistency in history. In 1953, in a villa outside the Kremlin, Stalin fell to the floor. The four people he had invited over for drinks walked around twice, then went to a meeting. They did not launch a coup, they simply chose not to save him. This kind of passive conspiracy through inaction is the hidden and hardest to prove form of internal political action. In 1976, in Zhongnanhai, Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying arrested a gang of four in the name of protecting the interests of the party, not under the banner of overthrowing the top leader. This is the standard operating mode for internal actions in the Chinese Communist Party, always in the name of the party, always under the banner of protecting legitimacy. Back to that small circle of internal political elites. What they need to do is not overthrow the leader with guns, but wrap everything in procedure. The most likely way is to hold an expanded politburo meeting or a central committee planning, and announce that Xi Jinping is stepping down from the top position due to health reasons or wrong judgments made at a major historical moment. No gunfire is needed, no tanks are needed, only enough politburo standing committee members standing on the same side. Only that moment when most people choose not to stand with Xi Jinping. And before all this happens, someone has already quietly confirmed where does the Beijing garrison commander stand now. Of course, Xi Jinping knows all this. He is not someone who does not understand history. It is precisely because he knows that he built that surveillance system in which everyone lives in fear, carried out that never-ending anti-corruption purge, kept tight control of the military, and replaced the head of Beijing's internal guard before moving against Zhang Youxiao. But there is a deeper logic here that he may not be able to overcome. The more thoroughly he purges, the more the remaining people's loyalty to him is built on fear rather than on a real community of interest. And the loyalty built on fear only works when the person appears strong. Once visible cracks appear in his power, fear reverses into its opposite. The fear of being purged turns into the motive to strike first. Stalin created the world's most perfect system of fear. Yet those four people still chose not to save him after he wet his pants. Gaddafi created what looked like an absolutely loyal personal guard. Yet that guard ultimately could not stop him from being dragged out of a drainage pipe. Xi Jinping has built the most sophisticated digital surveillance system in human history. But this system looks downwards, not upwards. The decisions made in that meeting room are still outside the view of any camera. Alright, let's assess the probability of this elite coup. Without a triggering event, the chance of a coup in any single year is very low. But over a 10-year time frame, especially when combined with an economic crisis or a setback in the Taiwan Strait, it is the highest probability violent path among all of them. This is not a subjective judgment. It is a historical pattern that has repeatedly appeared in authoritarian regimes of similar structure when facing similar conditions. After talking about all these paths full of violence, we need to face one question honestly. Is there any possibility that Xi Jinping leaves power in a relatively decent way? This is the Mubarak path. I talked about Mubarak specifically in the last episode. He was the only dictator who failed during the Arab Spring who died of old age in his own country, in his own bed. Why was he able to do that? The key was that Egyptian military did not completely betray him. They just wanted him to leave, not his life. What the military did was manage the transition. You go, we guarantee your safety. If you don't go, then things will not be so nice. Can this condition exist in China? The answer is close to impossible. Mubarak's Egypt had something Xi Jinping does not have, a military system that was relatively independent of the top leader's personal will, with its own interests and judgment. The Egyptian military was an interest group that controlled a large share of Egypt's economy. It had its own instinct for survival and could make independent judgments at critical moments that differed from the top leader's interests. What Xi Jinping has done is precisely to turn the People's Liberation Army into a tool that is completely dependent on him personally, rather than an institution with independent interests. This means the military lacks the independent ability to lead and manage the transition. It can only be loyal or betrayal. It is very hard for it to do the delicate middle option of escorting the leader out in a decent way. There is an even deeper obstacle. Xi Jinping has no successor. Mubarak was able to step down because there was a basic framework for transferring power. It may not have been perfect, but at least there was someone who could take over. Xi Jinping has dismantled all the power handover mechanisms. If he announced retirement tomorrow, the question of who to hand power to has no answer. This is a fatal obstacle for any soft landing arrangement. And the most important point, Xi Jinping himself may not want a soft landing at all. He has brought down so many people through anti-corruption and created so many political enemies. He knows what might be waiting for him once he loses the protection of power. This knowledge will make him hold on to that position tightly until his fingers no longer have the strength to grip it. So let's assess. The probability of a soft landing is the lowest among all ending paths, without question. Xi Jinping was born in 1953. He is 73 years old this year. Mao Zedong ruled until he was 83. Deng Xiaoping's actual influence continued until he died at 93. By the most conservative estimates, Xi Jinping still has 10 to 20 years of biological life left. Natural death sounds like the most ordinary ending among all of them. But history tells us that for dictators, the concept of natural death is often more complicated than it appears on the surface. First, purely natural death. If Xi Jinping dies of illness while in office, without any political reckoning, and simply stops breathing one morning, what would happen? First, a power vacuum. With no successor, the moment he amended the constitution, he also destroyed informal power handover rules the Chinese Communist Party had previously built. His sudden departure would trigger the most uncertain power succession contest in the party's history. Mao's case is a reference. After Mao died in 1976, within just one month, the Gang of Four was arrested and Hua Guofeng announced the crushing of the conspiracy group. The intensity of that power transition far exceeded the surface calm. After Xi Jinping, a similar power struggle is almost inevitable. And it could be even more intense than in 1976, because the power vacuum now is larger than it was then. Regarding his health, there are some public observations worth mentioning. Changes in his gait in several public appearances, his condition in certain activities, and so on, have already attracted the attention of serious outside researchers. Of course, we do not have reliable inside information, and any excessive speculation would be irresponsible. But one thing is certain, a 73-year-old man who has worked under extreme pressure for a long time, who cannot truly relax, and who cannot accept completely transparent medical supervision, does face real health risks. Now let's think more seriously about another scenario, unnatural natural death. It refers to a dictator living under the name of natural death, but with his death somehow accelerated by human factors. Stalin's four guests let him lie there for 13 hours with wet pants. Whether they poisoned him or not, the choice not to save him was itself an action. This does not require injection, any poison, or planning any conspiracy. It only requires, at that moment, choosing not to call the doctor. This form of unnatural natural death is one of the hardest kinds of dictator endings to record. It leaves no evidence, requires no courage, requires no coordination. It only needs one key choice, at a certain moment, to walk away from the person who has already lost consciousness besides you. Xi Jinping has a clear awareness of this threat. He is highly vigilant about food safety. His personal medical team has gone through strict political screening. He maintains extraordinary caution toward anyone who comes into physical contact with him. But this caution has a boundary that cannot be overcome. He must trust certain people. He must trust the doctors who treat him, the people who prepare his food, and the guards on night duty. There is always tension between the extreme distrust created by totalitarian rule and the minimum trust necessary to keep daily life running. This tension becomes harder and harder to balance as he grows older and his health begins to decline. And there is a paradox here. It is precisely the extreme political fear he has created that gives the people around him an extra motive to choose not to save at that critical moment. Because saving him might only prolong their own fear, while not saving him might be the beginning of their own release. This is exactly the math problem those four people solved in the villa beside Stalin. One day, the people around Xi Jinping will face the same arithmetic. Let's assess the probability of natural death. Pure natural death is the single highest probability pass over a long enough time span, without question. Time is the ultimate enemy of all dictators. No political machine can resist biological laws. For a 73-year-old man working under extreme political pressure without rest, in an environment where everyone has complicated feelings towards him, natural death should be the highest probability ending. Unnatural natural death, as his age increases and political contradictions accumulate, will gradually rise in probability. And the Chinese Communist Party's political culture has a very strong ability to package this kind of ending. It would be presented as Comrade Xi Jinping never forgot the great affairs of the state even on his sickbed, right up to the last moment. Alright, after all this analysis, at the end, I will rank the six paths from highest to lowest overall probability. 1. Natural death, including unnatural natural death. This is the highest probability single path, without dispute. Time is the final enemy of all dictators. No political machine can fight biological laws. For a 73-year-old man under extreme political pressure without rest, in an environment where everyone has complicated feelings towards him, natural death should be the most probable ending. 2. Internal elite coup. This is the highest probability path among all those involving active political action. It does not necessarily appear in the form of gunfire, but is more likely to be presented through an expanded politburo meeting, for example, packaged with a narrative of health reasons or voluntary resignation to complete an internal transfer of power. Its trigger usually requires a critical event, such as a Taiwan Strait crisis, a clear decline in Xi Jinping's health, or an intensification of the economic crisis. In years without a triggering event, its probability in that single year would be relatively low. 3. Economic collapse. The probability that economic collapse alone leads to Xi Jinping's ending is lower than the first two, because it is a slow variable and the system has some ability to absorb and delay it. But its function as a trigger and accelerator occupies a special place in the whole picture. It is the underlying soil for all paths. Without it, the soil for a coup could not be fertile enough. Without it, the temptation of the Taiwan gamble would be smaller. Without it, the loyalty calculations of the elite class would not undergo fundamental change. In this sense, the real importance of economic collapse may be higher than the ranking shows, because it is the foundational layer of the entire trigger network. 4. Taiwan Strait War. This is a binary variable. It either happens or it does not. If it happens, its catalytic power is the strongest among all paths. But its own probability of occurring carries huge uncertainty. This low-probability but high-impact nature places it in fourth position. In the absence of a Taiwan Strait war, this probability is close to zero. In wartime, it might rise somewhat, but it still faces an enormous risk of nuclear escalation. 5. External military decapitation. In the absence of a Taiwan Strait war, this probability is close to zero. 6. Soft landing, the Mubarak path. This has the lowest probability without question. We have now reached the last stop of the entire analysis. I want to raise a question that is even more important than his ending. What will happen to China after he is gone? Because history tells us that a dictator's death is often only the beginning of the story, not the end. After Gaddafi died, Libya fell into more than 10 years of civil war and chaos, and has still not truly stabilized. After Saddam died, Iraq became a mess torn apart by various forces. ISIS was born on that land, and millions of people were displaced. After Ceausescu died, Romania went through a long and painful transition but eventually found its own direction. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia experienced the chaos of the Yeltsin era, then Putin appeared. These cases point to an unsettling pattern. The end of an authoritarian regime does not equal the end of authoritarianism. If the forces that overthrow the dictator do not themselves establish a different political logic, the power vacuum is often filled by another form of strongman politics. So which road will China take? No one can give a definite answer to this question, but two directions are real. After Xi Jinping, those inside the party who were forced to obey during his era but who in their hearts missed the collective leadership rules of the Deng Xiaoping era may push for some kind of de-xification political reform. This would not be democratization but a return to a kind of oligarchic politics with multiple centers of power checking each other. There are historical precedents. After Stalin died, the Soviet Union had a relatively relaxed period of Khrushchev and collective leadership. After Mao died, China experienced Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up. This road is not democracy but it could be stable, and it might even create some space for long-term formal evolution. In history, power struggles after a dictator often give birth to a new strongman. Russia saw Putin after the chaos of Yeltsin. China saw Deng create a new authority system after Mao's high-pressure rule. A large country of 1.4 billion people without a democratic institutional framework and facing huge internal challenges has an internal logic for seeking stability through strongman authority. So which direction is more likely? It depends on the specific conditions when Xi Jinping's ending arrives. Whether it comes amid the smoke of war or in the ruins of an economic crisis, different situations will activate different historical paths. But one thing holds true in all situations. That day in China will be one of the most important turning points in human history in the 21st century. Because China's size means that no matter which direction it goes, it will profoundly reshape the world's political and economic landscape. On that day, global stock markets will fluctuate. Energy markets will shake. Strategic patterns will be reshuffled. Taiwan's fate will produce new possibilities within weeks. North Korea's system will face new pressure. The entire East Asian power balance will enter a highly uncertain period of reorganization. On that day, hundreds of millions of Chinese people will, for the first time, face a question they have never truly thought about. This question currently cannot be openly discussed inside China, but it will not disappear just because it is not discussed. It will accumulate in hidden forms in the hearts of every Chinese person with independent thinking ability, waiting for the moment it is released. Our discussion today is drawing to a close. Starting from the last episode, we have walked through a long analytical journey, and this entire long discussion is built on one premise, no dictator is forever. It is not because we hold personal hatred towards any individual, nor because we hope China falls into chaos, but because this is a law repeatedly proven by thousands of years of human history. Any power system built on one person's will, rather than on institutions and the rule of law, has its moment of ending. This was true for Qin Shi Huang, for Napoleon, for Stalin, for Mao Zedong. The real question has never been whether it will fall, but after he falls, what will grow in the ruins? In history, the end of a dictator sometimes brings liberation, sometimes brings deeper darkness. What decides which one it will be is not the dictator's ending, but whether that society after dictator is gone has accumulated enough intellectual resources, institutional foundations and human awakening to meet that moment. This is why we are discussing this issue today, not to curse, not to prophesy, but to think. Before that moment arrives, what can we do? What should we do? And what do we hope will grow in those ruins? A freer China would be good for the Chinese people and good for the whole world. This is not an ideological statement, it is a historical judgment. A China that can complete power handover within a framework of rules and institutions, a China that does not need to rely on one man's will to keep running, will be a safer China for Chinese people and for the whole world. That China is worth looking forward to, worth thinking about, and even worth preparing for. Where history goes has never been decided only by those sitting at the center of power. It is decided together by every person who can still maintain clear thinking in the darkness. Thank you so much for watching. If you find this video helpful, please like it, drop a comment below, and hit the subscribe button right here. It really helps YouTube suggest my video to others. I'll be back with more content soon. Until then, be well.