Xi Jinping had such great luck it's hard to fathom, really:

was born into CCP blue blood
managed to fly under the radar within the party for a long time
inherited a booming economy
was able to use "anti-corruption" to crush his enemies

had an absolute dumbass opponent in the White House for four years
had Merkel and Macron leading the EU and "expressing concern" every now and then
managed to castrate the CCP to an extent where nobody would openly oppose his claim to lifetime rule anymore

almost got away with operating concentration camps for a few years
unwittingly unleashed SARS 2 upon the world, a virus for which his own country was relatively well prepared (lessons learned from SARS 1 in 2003 + an increasingly totalitarian surveillance state)

I guess it's understandable that he would get overconfident at some point.

Especially given the fact that everybody knows he's basically just a shit-talking "park uncle" (公园大爷) ever since he once claimed to have carried 200 pounds of wheat for 5 kilometers straight.

Well, Trump is gone. And soon Merkel will be gone, too.

Meanwhile Xi Jinping (whom people like Kevin Rudd suspect of being a strategic mastermind) has somehow managed to alienate lots of people. The future of CAI is unclear, the EU is talking to India, everyone is vaccinating.

And the worst thing is: I'm not sure if Xi Jinping - being a classic aggressive dictator who has his population half in awe of his grandeur and half scared shitless of his brutality - is getting proper information from his underlings about the political situation.

So maybe Xi Jinping, knowing his own luck (and by now probably believing that he once really did carry 200 pounds on one shoulder), simply doesn't *know* that he's been sailing into a weather front for a while now.

That fucking dumbass.

Oh by the way, Kevin Rudd is apparently writing a PHD where he's critically analyzing Xi Jinping's "thought".

Yes.