The Paper Dragon: Xi's Five Fatal Flaws
Five systemic weaknesses that challenge China’s image of rising power
Key takeaways:
Xi Jinping's brittle control system stifles feedback, creating dangerous blind spots in crisis.
China's economic model, often perceived as an unshakeable strength, lacks the resilience required for prolonged conflict, undermining the PLA's war-preparedness rhetoric.
Political centralization has hollowed out bureaucratic and military autonomy, leading to command paralysis across both systems.
Tactical opportunism masks deep strategic insecurity: Xi avoids irreversible commitments even as he tests limits.
Despite the headlines about Taiwan, hypersonics, and spy balloons, much of what defines Xi Jinping's strategic posture remains misunderstood. Western media tends to spotlight China's rising military might and economic clout while overlooking the internal fragilities beneath its assertive façade. Xi presides over a system marked by brittle command structures, institutional decay, and mismatched risk tolerances. These aren't peripheral concerns; they are central to China's ability to govern and coerce, and they matter far more than the number of warships it can build.
This piece identifies five under-examined dimensions of Xi's leadership that will shape China's strategic trajectory far more than national slogans or the next military exercise.
1. The Internal Collapse of Strategic Feedback Loops
While China's one-party system has long favored loyalty, the scale and intensity of the purge-and-surveillance consensus are deeply Xi-specific. Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin might have managed dissent but did not erase it. Xi's brand of paranoid centralization, where errors are punished by disappearance, is an innovation, not a legacy. This approach is not simply Party orthodoxy. It's personalized statecraft.
Xi Jinping has built a system that performs loyalty rather than practicing competence. Strategic assessments are increasingly filtered, delayed, or fabricated to align with political expectations in the civilian bureaucracy and the military. This has created a feedback-impaired regime in which Xi may not learn something has gone wrong until the consequences are irreversible.
We've already unpacked this dynamic in detail in The Architecture of Paranoia and Command Collapse. Together, these analyses form the foundational lens through which all other elements of Xi's brittle system can be understood.
These authoritarian weaknesses are a modern problem and part of Xi's inheritance. The ambiguity and fear surrounding Mao-era ideological campaigns left scars that Xi has internalized. While many of these weaknesses have historical roots in China's Leninist party-state, their intensification, scale, and rigidity under Xi mark a sharp break from the Hu and Jiang eras. The legacy of political "struggle" and contradictory messaging created a tradition of strategic paralysis, one Xi is now replicating with tighter control and greater costs.
2. China's Inability to Sustain a Wartime Economy
This breakdown in strategic feedback becomes exponentially more dangerous when paired with an economic structure equally incapable of adapting to crisis. While the PLA talks increasingly about preparing for "real war," the economic structure underneath it is profoundly unready.
China's supply chains are designed for export profit, not battlefield durability. Strategic fuel reserves are estimated to last only 60–90 days under high-stress conditions. Meanwhile, China imports virtually all of its advanced semiconductors, with cutting-edge chips below 7nm produced exclusively by foreign foundries now barred from Chinese sales.
China's legitimacy rests on performance - rising incomes and urban prosperity - making wartime austerity politically radioactive. Citizens accustomed to decades of rising living standards will perceive war as failure, not national renewal. Unlike wartime economies of the past, China cannot risk economic downturn without losing domestic buy-in and shattering the performance-based compact that underpins Xi's rule.
But the real problem runs deeper than logistics. Xi Jinping's leadership is rooted in a legacy of economic control used as a political tool inherited from past CCP struggles against ideological dilution. His emphasis on political purity has made the economy more rigid, not more resilient.
China's COVID pivot demonstrated tactical learning capacity but also revealed its inherent brittleness: policy reversals came only after intense political pressure, often yielding abrupt shifts and steep economic costs that were magnified by the system's inability to anticipate or adapt in advance. Wartime economies require dynamism, sacrifice, and innovation. Xi's system, obsessed with ideological conformity and suspicious of market autonomy, produces the opposite.
Xi's political crackdown on tech firms has already wiped out over $1 trillion in market value since 2020 - an emblem of how the Party’s obsession with control smothers the very innovation and agility a wartime economy would demand. This pervasive Party control means the economy cannot readily shift to a conflict footing, thereby shifting an even greater, unmanageable burden onto the security apparatus, which Xi is also tightening.
3. Xi's Deep Fear of Internal Military Autonomy
Economic rigidity mirrors and reinforces Xi's parallel campaign to eliminate autonomous judgment within the military. The People's Liberation Army isn't just Xi's instrument of national defense. It's the institution he most fears losing control over. At the heart of Xi's military doctrine lies a profound distrust of improvisation. His reforms aren't designed to empower field commanders but to prevent them from thinking independently.
Rather than cultivating agile, mission-driven command, the PLA is structured to prioritize political compliance over battlefield initiative. Brigade and theater-level officers are conditioned to seek permission before adapting and justify their actions afterward. While other modern militaries train for initiative under pressure, Xi's doctrine rewards restraint until direction is received. That may work in peace, but it collapses in war.
This fear of autonomy is deeply personal. Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun, was purged during the Cultural Revolution, and Xi witnessed how ideological uncertainty destroyed even seasoned leaders like Zhou Enlai. Joseph Torigian noted in Foreign Affairs that he was "shaken by how the experienced Zhou, who understood Mao better than most, could nevertheless face devastating setbacks." These early experiences calcified into Xi's command philosophy: he sees ambiguity as risk, trust as vulnerability, and autonomous judgment as a threat to central authority.
What emerges is a military that may appear loyal and unified but, in reality, lacks the flexibility, trust, and speed of decision-making needed to survive a modern battlefield. This crackdown on military autonomy also mirrors broader systemic centralization extending to the entire civil bureaucracy.
4. The Collapse of the CCP's Civilian Bureaucratic Capacity
Xi's systematic neutering of military autonomy reflects a broader pattern of centralized control that has equally paralyzed China's civilian bureaucracy. Xi's anti-corruption drive and ideological campaigns have hollowed out the administrative base that once made China's authoritarianism unusually efficient. Mid-level officials who used to run ministries, manage cities, and execute national strategy are increasingly paralyzed by fear of punishment or purging.
This erosion of capacity isn't just a product of Xi's rule - it's a replication of older CCP behavior where contradictory political expectations destroyed bureaucratic confidence. Like past eras of campaign-driven governance, officials today are told to be bold and loyal simultaneously, an impossible balance that leads most to default to bureaucratic inertia. The conditions that once produced local experimentation and policy innovation have been reversed. The CCP's mid-level administrative ranks, once a strength of the post-Deng era, are now riddled with decision paralysis and risk aversion.
Many are choosing inaction over initiative. The result is a policy environment in which decisions pile up in Beijing, but implementation falters everywhere. Key reforms in healthcare, rural revitalization, and even digital infrastructure have stalled because provincial and ministerial leadership is either under investigation or unwilling to act without explicit political cover.
Even Xi's signature initiatives, like Common Prosperity and dual-circulation, suffer from bureaucratic anemia. Xi's centralization and anti-corruption targets hobbled sectors beyond tech, draining talent and slowing decision-making across government ministries. Local officials are either too inexperienced, timid, or disincentivized to carry them out consistently or creatively.
This bureaucratic dysfunction is no longer a matter of political overreach. It's a systemic administrative atrophy that threatens everything from disaster response to economic stabilization. Western strategies must prepare not for seamless Chinese ascendance but for the instability of Xi's grip on power.
5. Xi's Strategic Insecurity Hidden Behind Tactical Opportunism
Where institutional competence has atrophied across military and civilian systems, Xi increasingly compensates through tactical performance that masks deeper structural paralysis. Western media often frames Xi as a bold, aggressive leader who is reshaping the global order. But his actual record shows a very different trait: strategic insecurity masked by tactical bluster.
Consider the South China Sea: Western analysts frequently depict China's aggressive island building and militarization as evidence of confident expansionism. However, viewed through Xi's strategic insecurity, these actions appear as calculated, reversible acts of coercion rather than bold, irreversible commitments. The 'salami-slicing,' the endless warplane sorties near Taiwan, the wolf warrior diplomacy: these are calibrated provocations that avoid full commitment.
That pattern has roots in leadership lessons passed down from an era when ambiguity could be deadly. Xi Jinping came of age watching Party elites maneuver through overlapping crises where risk, even well-intentioned, was punished. His caution is not ideological hesitancy. It's a deeply ingrained instinct to avoid irreversible outcomes. While willing to test limits, he consistently avoids the kind of large-scale confrontations that would force a commitment he can't control.
What's missing is a pattern of decisive risk-taking. Xi hasn't launched new wars, toppled neighboring regimes, or militarized economic instruments beyond reversible thresholds. That's not restraint. It's fear of losing control. Xi's preference for reversible coercion echoes the pattern in his tech purges, aggressive enough to grab attention but capped to avoid blowback.
This pattern matters because it suggests Xi may escalate only when he feels cornered, not when he's confident. Tactical opportunism can be reversed, but strategic decisions, once made, cannot. Xi has shown an aversion to permanent consequences.
Xi's reluctance to escalate isn't always incompetence. It sometimes functions as a delaying strategy, preserving optionality, avoiding foreign overreaction, and buying time for internal consolidation. But delay without adaptation is not strategy. It's stalling. And in a crisis, that distinction matters.
There are several possible scenarios in which all five of Beijing's vulnerabilities would be activated simultaneously, including a crisis in the Taiwan Strait, the combination of an economic shock plus a political crisis, e.g., a major financial crisis during a leadership transition, and a natural disaster coupled with external pressure, such as another pandemic scenario.
Understanding this distinction is crucial for anyone trying to predict how China might behave in a true geopolitical crisis. The loudest move is not always the most dangerous one. Sometimes, it's the silence that signals something more serious.
Where is Xi's adaptive edge?
To understand the limits of China's coercive reach, we must examine where Xi miscalculates and how he learns. His regime has shown nimbleness in tactical responses like restructuring Party bodies, recalibrating economic policy, and rolling back unpopular regulations. But such moves are defensive, not creative. The purge mechanism is the primary adaptation mode: mistakes are punished, not corrected. This zero-tolerance learning model works in authoritarian control but fails in complex systems that require experimentation, iteration, and error tolerance. Unlike wartime democracies, China has no equivalent of the 1940 national mobilization; instead, it punishes failure. That, more than any external shock, limits its adaptive capacity.
While the system has proven capable of reactive course correction, such as adjusting COVID policy or reining in overzealous tech crackdowns, it struggles to generate anticipatory strategy. Tactical recalibration is not strategic evolution. And when legitimacy depends on both control and performance, this asymmetry becomes dangerous. Xi's team has proven capable of learning externally, adapting tools of geoeconomic coercion, digital propaganda, and crisis response from rivals like the US and Russia. But those adaptations rarely extend inward. Innovation remains politically dangerous inside the system, and loyalty is still prized over insight.
Crisis Intelligence Signals
Analysts and policymakers should monitor indicators when gauging CCP stability under pressure.
Lagged Execution → ex. PLA response time in a Taiwan crisis: Expect increasing delays between orders and action across military and bureaucratic channels.
Tactical-Strategic Disconnect → ex. a PLA skirmish without follow-through: Beijing's showy moves may not reflect coherent campaigns but internal confusion.
Local Effort as a Canary → ex. policy pullbacks in Guangdong or Fujian: Spot rising internal paralysis when provincial governments slow or reverse flagship national priorities.
Provisional Escalation → ex. sharp actions in the Himalayas, then sudden de-escalation: Surges in coercive diplomacy or show-of-force can signal strategic anxiety, not resolve.
What Comes Next
Each of these systemic vulnerabilities represents more than just internal friction. Together, they explain why China's outward confidence is increasingly a performance. China's internal fragility won't erupt in a single event. It will surface quietly through hesitation, missed signals, and the gap between projection and capacity. Seeing that gap isn't analysis - it's strategy. In the years ahead, deterrence will belong to those who see it first.