"When things get rolling again"

This seems overoptimistic. It's not so simple as that. The Party has shaken a lot of the life out of various geese growing golden eggs, business confidence is in the dirt, consumption is teetering, wealth effects from real estate are fading, the foreign environment is more challenging than ever, and FDI flows are likely down by a third or more.

Just ending zero COVID will not put Humpty Dumpty back together as he looked in 2019. And the reality is that without widely rolling out a more effective vaccine than they currently have, that is not possible anyway; it's both bad policy and terrible from an optics standpoint.

I think the future of China's coming decade looks a lot more like the vista stretching out from 1965 than from 1976. If and when Xi dies, *then* perhaps the Party will be able to reinvent itself in the way that it did after Deng pushed the Gang of Four off the cliff.

But he's going to die in office. It's in the nature of what he has become and the things he believes; he's the indispensable man.