Captain Jim Fennell

I think my issue is to the degree with which those factions have a real substantive impact on Xi's ability to have control.

For instance, and I mentioned this in the morning segment, this purge of these nine generals that hit on Friday that's really raised this issue

before the plenum, those were being discussed over the last year.

And some of the first purges were occurring.

And this is something that's occurred throughout Xi's 12 years of rule.

And it gets to the heart of his efforts to reform not just the party, but the PLA.

And so he's done over 12 years, massive changes to the PLA, especially in 2015 and 2016.

And so what we see right now is the economy is weak, as Jim said.

We're at this point where if there's going to be a discussion about these kinds of factional disputes, it'll come in this plenum.

And what I think Xi did was he cleaned out the PLA, those that were party members that were going to be in this party Congress, to clean them out so that they were not

in present at the event.

So there would be no kind of event like you saw with Hu Jintao and that he could have total control over the process to be able to set the 15th five-year plan.

And so I think that's kind of where we're at.

And when it comes to the military aspect, throughout, if you go back and you follow our analysis of the Soviet Union, we always looked at leadership and intentions and we looked at capabilities.

And in this case, when you look at the PRC,

We can examine leadership.

And we had, you know, rumors from the kind of the same sources saying that Xi had a stroke over the last couple of months.

Yet we continue to see Xi very much present in the international stage.

Last week, meeting with International Women's Global Women's Forum and meeting many, many people.

So those rumors kind of don't come true.