One Year of Watching China: What the Pattern Reveals About Power
What a year of tracking Beijing’s moves revealed about governance warfare, strategic competition, and the architecture of power.
A year ago I made a commitment to myself: write every week for a year. Watch China. Track what moves and what doesn’t. See what the pattern reveals. I wanted to understand everything I could about how China conducts strategic competition.
The pattern revealed more than I expected.
Fifty-two weeks of sustained observation taught me something that no single week could have. Through a trade war, a summit, a Strait of Hormuz crisis, purges inside the PLA, and the quiet administrative machinery that never makes the front page, the same structural logic kept surfacing. China’s behavior is not episodic. It is architectural. And the architecture is not military. It is governance.
What I’ve been calling governance warfare (the use of administrative systems, institutional design, legal authority, and procedural terrain as primary instruments of strategic competition) did not start as a theory. It started as a pattern I kept seeing in the data. Week after week, the moves that mattered most were not the ones that generated headlines. They were the ones that restructured who controls the rules, who writes the standards, who holds the procedural leverage when a decision has to be made.
Beijing understands this. Much of the existing analytical vocabulary still treats these moves as separate categories: legal pressure, economic coercion, institutional influence, technical standards, diplomatic signaling. It identifies the symptoms without possessing the structural language to diagnose the condition.
This newsletter spent a year building that vocabulary. And then something happened that I did not plan but should have anticipated: the framework started getting tested in real time.
When Iran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz, the dominant analytical frame was kinetic: navies, oil flows, chokepoints. What governance warfare revealed was different. The Strait was not a chokepoint being threatened. It was administrative terrain being contested. Maritime insurance withdrawal, flag-state liability exposure, sanctions architecture. These were the instruments doing much of the work. A former NSC Director for Iran published his assessment in Foreign Affairs the same week. The facts were there. What was missing was the frame. That gap is the reason this framework exists.
When Beijing prepared the ground for the Trump-Xi summit in May, CTW tracked the pre-positioning in real time: the diplomatic synchronization, the definitional moves, the signal suppression. When the summit concluded, CTW was one of the few publications that treated the governance dimensions of the outcome as the main event rather than the sideshow. That was not because I had better sources. It was because I was asking a different question.
A year ago I didn’t know whether this would work. I knew I was seeing something real, but seeing something and proving it are different problems. I can now point to a year of specific, forward-looking analytical calls across trade, military reform, institutional positioning, and diplomatic signaling. The framework held: not as a slogan, and not as an occasional interpretive convenience, but as a way to identify signals early, name the terrain, and test what followed. The record is documented and defensible in a way that very few independent analytical products can claim after twelve months.
That record changed what I think this project is.
Xinanigans started as a China newsletter. It still is. CTW will continue every Friday, with China as the primary field site for observing governance warfare in real time. The format will sharpen, but the purpose will not change: track the signals that matter, state the assessment up front, identify leverage, and name the indicators that will confirm or challenge the call. China remains the theater where this form of competition is most visible and most advanced. But the framework explains more than Beijing.
It explains why Gulf states are building regulatory architecture to capture future standard-setting authority. It explains why African mineral corridors are being governed in ways that predetermine who benefits from the energy transition. It explains why sanctions regimes function not merely as economic pressure, but as administrative terrain that reshapes institutional relationships. And it explains why many of the most important contests in global power now occur before crisis, before conflict, and often before most observers realize a strategic decision has been made.
The Tuesday series now moves deeper into application. The conceptual foundation is built enough to travel: into specific theaters, specific decision problems, and specific audiences, including capital allocators and corporate strategists navigating governance-level risk, not just defense and policy professionals.
Some of the work is consolidating into longer-form projects, including a book built from the architecture developed across this first year. Some of it is moving beyond publication into advisory work for institutions and decision-makers confronting governance-level competition directly. Good analysis should be useful. Useful analysis should be sustainable. I intend to build both.
A year ago I was writing from the woods of Massachusetts to an audience I could count on two hands. I did not promote the newsletter. I did not pitch it to anyone. I published, and I let the work speak. The readership that found its way here, across defense, intelligence, academic, and private-sector communities on six continents, arrived because the analysis was useful to problems they were already working on. That is the only kind of audience I am interested in building, and it is the only kind of validation I trust.
If you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you. If you joined along the way, welcome. If you’re reading this for the first time, start anywhere. The pattern will find you.
V/r,
Erika