TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Minxin Pei argues that by overestimating China’s strength, and the CCP’s grip on power, the U.S. is not thinking through potentialities for China’s future and how we should respond to them:

The most consequential effect of this disconnect is the loss of an opportunity both to rethink U.S. China policy and to prepare for possible discontinuity in China’s trajectory in the coming two decades. The central pillar of Washington’s China policy is the continuation of the status quo, a world in which the Communist Party’s rule is assumed to endure for decades. Similar assumptions underpinned Washington’s policies toward the former Soviet Union, Suharto’s Indonesia, and more recently Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya. Discounting the probability of regime change in seemingly invulnerable autocracies has always been an ingrained habit in Washington.