Captain Jim Fennell

So we'll find out in the next week.

If Xi is still in power a week from today, we'll know that maybe these rumors weren't true.

If he's gone, then that'll be something that we'll have to face.

It's possible that that's part of it, but I think it's more endemic.

I think Jim talked about the thousand years of history and there's an old saying that in the center is the rule and out in the hinterlands, they can't control everything.

And so what I think is what Xi is running up against is thousands of years of dynastic evolution where people make money through corruption.

and clinging to bits and pieces of power.

We see it in our own country.

It's part of human nature.

And so what I think is, is that Xi is having to continue to continually find and root out corruption in the party in order to achieve his global initiatives.

And so I think he has a global Marxist-Leninist view of how he wants the PRC to rule the world.

And he knows that he can't get there if the people under him are corrupt and not following through with pure party loyalty.

Well, that's a great question.

And I would say that the party itself, if it's in this kind of turmoil to the extent that they remove Xi...

You know, it'll be very hard for us to predict exactly who will replace him.

There are speculations that this General Zhang,

vice minister or vice chair of the Central Military Commission, if he's the one that's really moving the chess pieces around and he's a strong proponent of the PLA and all these PLA activities that we've seen ramp up, especially towards Taiwan in the last three years, if he's the degenerator of all this, then we should be standing by for some very serious potential for an invasion of Taiwan.

On the other hand, there's the factions that may say, hey, we've gone too far.

The economy is

is being destroyed and we need to pull back our, you know, pull back a bit in terms of our aggressiveness and let's keep our economy going and let's try to repair the damage that Xi did economically.