 I think the most fascinating story in the news right now is that China is backing off many of its COVID restrictions, like in the face of mass protests. So you would think that a dictatorial, powerful state like the one operated by the Chinese Communist Party would not back down, but they're backing down in front of the protest. What happens when dictatorships start backing down and trying to compromise with protestants? That's frequently the death knell of a dictatorship. So six weeks ago, like Xi Jinping was re-elected to essentially a lifetime in power, we promised all these things, new era, he seemed in complete control of China's 1.4 billion people. Now we've had this nationwide surge of protests and a small, mostly youthful part of the population is demanding an entirely different culture, a more liberal culture, less controlling culture, politically freer culture, and this dissent has broken through China's rules against censorship, detention, official damnation. So the police are rallying to try to stamp out new protests, but the government is compromising with the protestors, right? So intrusive COVID pandemic controls being restricted. Residents get to return to work for the first time in weeks. Residents are often no longer required to take regular COVID tests. So the official line from the Chinese Communist Party is that the country is entering a new phase in its campaign against the virus. So there have been widespread protests, demonstrations against the COVID lockdowns, like the Communist have been searching people's phones, they've been warning would-be protestors, they've been interrogating detained participants, they've been staging loud shows of forced potential protest sites, but we've got a flash flood of defiance. The Xi Jinping's caught on power six weeks ago, it seemed unassailable. Now it looks much less sure. So the government is trying to extinguish the current discontent by reducing or eliminating its harshest and most arbitrary COVID prevention measures, but now supporters of this protest movement, they want far more, they want to rein in the Chinese Communist Party. So this outrage isn't just coming from one policy, it's been pent up over years, there's no channel for free expression. So now we have thousands of protestors in China, okay, ostensibly it's about Xi's stringent zero COVID policies, but these protests are flaring into demands for democracy. We've got students on university campuses chanting for an end to censorship. So China has a formidable security apparatus to squash defiance, but the longer these protests run the more chance they have to take fire and produce a powerful backlash to Xi and possibly even lead to his removal from China, because he's not been doing a good job. China was on a really good path until about eight years ago, but over the last eight years China has grown more threatening or militaristic, they've gotten into more and more fights with their neighbors, so more and more nations have been incentivized to ally against the rising of China, and Xi's strong shorthand on power now seems more precarious, right? We've got rest of university students, and the future economically looks bleak for China. That was the one thing the Chinese Communist Party had going for them, is good management of the economy. Well, now the economy is not doing so well. The Chinese vaccines don't really work very well. So China's zero COVID policies disrupted the economy, disrupted society, they killed people, but public support for these zero COVID policies have gone away. So more and more Chinese are sick of the authoritarian security state. We had one man protesting in northwest Beijing, a furling, abandoned, denouncing Xi Jinping as a despotic traitor, but the most interesting thing about all this is that China is backing away from its harsh COVID rules, right? Got all these Chinese cities announcing easing of lockdowns, easing of testing requirements, return to work, right? So the ruling Chinese Communist Party is backing down on these unpopular COVID restrictions in response to this wave of mass protests, right? These protests have been the most widespread challenge to Beijing in 30 plus years. I was at UCLA in the spring of 1989 when they had the Tiananmen Square protests. It's kind of reminding me a little bit of that time. We've got protests in over a dozen cities in China against Beijing's tight COVID lockdown policies. Now the party is showing its willingness to address the root cause of the public anger and truly pandemic controls that have stifled economic growth. That millions of people confined to their homes, long stretches, setting off violent protests. So top security officials are warning that they will crack down on these public protests. But what's striking is that the police measures so far have been quite mild. So how far will China be willing to compromise? And will the protesters accept these compromises? So if Beijing removes its heavy-handed approach to COVID, you could have millions of Chinese dying from COVID. So China is no longer using its phrase dynamic zero COVID, right? That's how it described its policy, but it stopped using that language. So now they're talking about, oh, we're entering a new phase. It's like, remember, I had this article, it's going to be published in the forward. It's a Jewish online publication. It used to be a weekly print newspaper. And I wrote a piece, it was all publication, and then they decided, oh, we're going to go in a new direction. Is the Kanye West Alex Jones trying to topic of conversation among the shillers at the beach? No. Just riding across the bay is just such a Sydney harbour, such a gentle rocking motion in the ferry. People are just happy here. I very rarely hear words of anger. Politics isn't particularly important. People just like to go to the beach here and have fun. So the Chinese officials are announcing change in policy, all right? There's one official, she's not wearing a mask. So when the editor decided that before they didn't want to publish me, they just used the euphemism, we're going in a new direction, right? So we're going in a new direction. It means that we're not going forward with what we had planned. So China is altering its approach to COVID due to these protests. And so what further changes may be inspired by these protests? Maybe many of China's elites will see that Xi Jinping has been doing a terrible job of governing the country over the past few years and removing from power. So we could be on the verge of major change in China. China is in a very nasty position. Frequently said, I don't believe that China, as a nation state, as we know it today will still exist in 10 years. I've been saying this for several years, about seven years. I mean, eight years, I've been talking about how China's not nearly as strong as it presents itself or as it is presented in the news media. So we could have all sorts of small steps that could lead to big differences in how China operates. The easing of lockdowns, unhooking of masks, deviating from COVID-19 protocols, people being allowed to go back to work, limiting testing requirements, limiting lockdowns, rolling back of controls across social media and chat groups. So a lot of the protesters are talking about how happy they are, picturing how life could be after the country's restrictions are loosed. Now, China could emerge from one crisis, the protests to another, hundreds of thousands of mass infections, overwhelming hospitals, hundreds of thousands of millions of dead Chinese. So really the only thing Chinese Communist parties have going for it is that it seems ostensibly to have limited death rates from COVID. But if they ease and then have mass death in response to COVID, then Chinese Communist Party doesn't even have that going for it. So a month ago, these kind of widespread protests, absolutely unthinkable in China, normally descends as absolutely smothered by censorship and surveillance and a very powerful security state. But now we're looking at how dissatisfaction over ostensibly COVID prevention measures can quickly spiral into much deeper grievances about how the Chinese Communist Party is asserting itself into the daily life of ordinary Chinese crushing them. So Chinese may be tired of the shrinking space for expression. There's a death of a famous Chinese politician this week. They may try to seize momentum in the morning. So it's worth keeping an eye on China and see if these protests escalate. There's something more threatening to the Chinese Communist Party. And if China's elites decide that they no longer will serve by Xi Jinping.