Lingling Wei

The people I talk to around the Chinese leadership keep telling me that Xi Jinping thinks he's, quote, cracked a code on Trump.

If you're a bank and you refuse to process a payment for one of those refineries because of U.S.

sanctions, you can get sued in China.

Same if you're the insurer who won't write the policy or the shipping company that won't carry the cargo.

So suddenly, complying with American law could be an offense in China.

And there's really no clear way out.

Follow Washington, you get sued in Beijing.

And follow Beijing, you lose access to the dollar system.

Historically, when China didn't want the deal to go through, it would just slow walk it for many years until the parties gave up.

This time, they just said no in one line sentence.

So you got two unprecedented moves in seven days, both one-sentence orders, both using tools that have been sitting on the shelf for years.

That is not a coincidence.

That is a posture shift.

The people I talk to around the Chinese leadership keep telling me that Xi Jinping thinks he's, quote, cracked the code on Trump, that Trump can be outweighed, can be exhausted, that you can escalate without blowing up the whole relationship.

General Zhang Youxia, the senior most general and number two of the Central Military Commission, which is basically the Chinese military's decision-making body, was under investigation for, quote, severe violations of party discipline and state laws.

Zhang is the most senior active duty military officer to be ousted and put under investigation by Xi Jinping and the highest ranking military figure purged in decades.

So that announcement was really a bombshell.

But our reporting does not confirm whether those allegations are true or not.

Beijing's internal explanations do not always reflect the complete or even true motivation behind Xi Jinping's decisions.

It's a huge black box.