My 3 1/2 cents worth: This leadership is the most ruthless and scary China had for 35 years. That is, what the vote shows, not more. SOE "reform" has been ongoing for decades. Nothing ever cured the classic socialist ills which such companies tend to suffer from - not only in China. It is glaringly obvious, that SOE in China keep sputtering and continue having a hard time competing with private enterprise in their relevant sectors. Therefore, the patriotic entrepreneur is she/he, who doesn't focus on aggressive expansion, particularly not at the expense of SOE. She/he will not focus bottom line growth, but on maximising employment and/or raising incomes and living standards for staff, in terms of achieving an egalitarian society, a.k.a. "common prosperity". Xi's comments about US-led containment of China clearly show one thing, that the containment is working. It is causing pain. Denial of access has become a major problem, as in the best case it may push China back to the middle income trap of ten years ago, IMHO. No nation built on export can thrive without free access to the US market. No dual circulation (when will we see the comeback of the Foreign Exchange Certificate FEC?) or any other absurd measure will work to change China's export and import dependency. The hegemon made China rich. He can also make China poor again. That is the simple truth and no amount of self-reliance policy can change that. To make it perfectly clear, it was not the West who changed, it was China who changed after 2012 and sent everyone down the path on which we are now. Had there been no change of China, no US-politician in his right mind would have demanded to confront China: Wall Street would have clobbered her/him. China's leadership now must be rightfully afraid, that if they begin offering to wind back some of the development (whatever they may find expendible - Xinjiang labour camps, perhaps? A nationalist-neutral move, just declare victory over "terrorism") will only encourage the US to demand more. Biden, Blinken & Co. may want to go down in history as the dragon-slayers. Letting communists stare down a bottomless pit is perhaps not the best of all ideas. Perhaps the time has come to issue a list of demands beyond which there will be none - quietly through diplomatic channels - and let the quiet diplomatic wrestling begin. Anti-US propaganda is trivial, no problem per se. China's leaders protect their backsides: The man who can smile when things go wrong, has always thought of someone to blame it on.