I keep coming back to this in my mind. Before Covid, Hong Kong was an absolute tinderbox. It wasn't ready to explode, it was exploding. And it must have completely freaked the CCP out. You can imagine how, if HK had succeeded in demanding more freedoms, or maintaining what they had, how that would have sent a message to the rest of China, particularly once the inevitable real estate meltdown started. Covid nipped it all in the bud.

Me too. The choices were either another Tienanmen Square or ... stick to the terms of the agreement - one country two systems - but that wasn't gonna happen coz of what you say above. Then along came the magic bullet: Covid
I have wondered if the plan was to release it in HK but there was a slip between lips & cup & it escaped in Wuhan instead.

I note there's now a new mysterious virus in northern China that appears to affect children more severely - so the opposite of Covid. It's been blamed on lockdown backlog, could be, but one thing we do know is that we can't trust a word CCP/WHO says. You'd be better off trusting the opposite. To tease that out, theoretically, you might wanna time an invasion with the explosion of a new child-killer virus. That way you could introduce martial law (which is what Covid restrictions were) & if you scared the public enough, you might find there was enough compliance to pull it off.

... here's the thing --

First, there's a reserve currency card that hasn't been played yet. If the US were forced to fight two wars directly on two fronts on opposite sides of the world, it would drive the USD into even more debt, which China would hold to a large extent and which it could use to screw the US by working with Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and everyone else who is sick of getting screwed by trade dependence on the USD to dump it for a different reserve/trade currency, probably the Yuan.

That's a serious-arsed lever right there.

War costs money, and the US doesn't have any. The only way it can do what it does is because the USD is the reserve currency. So it can print as much as it likes to service its dept. It's a shell game. A 'King with no clothes', bizarre time in history.

An astute observation, with incredible implications, that rarely gets raised - which i guess is the king with no clothes bit. There are a lot of wars that can be waged that don't necessarily involve shooting - cyber, economic - even chemical warfare. Fentanyl is chemical warfare. When Xi agreed to reduce its introduction into US society, that's an admission that he was/is deliberately doing it.

I wonder where the line is with how far you can push these things - maybe we'll find out ...