Several high-profile purges are said to have happened in China over the past few months. What do they mean? Do the mysterious removals of cabinet ministers and generals signal weakness? Paranoia? Or something else?

Because China is a tightly controlled totalitarian nation, getting good information on it is difficult. China even ceased issuing certain reports about its economic performance last August while criminalizing the gathering of basic corporate performance data necessary to make sound investment decisions.

In this context, everything coming out of China should be viewed with extreme skepticism: Is this true, or is this something China wants us to think is true?

In World War II, Winston Churchill counseled, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” For the Chinese Communist Party, rulers of the People’s Republic of China, it’s always wartime, and the truth must be hidden.

Deng Xiaoping, a hardened revolutionary under Mao, ran China for most of the ’80s. His strategy versus America was to “Hide your strength, bide your time.” It paid off when, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union two years later, the U.S. neglected to revise its Cold War marriage of convenience with China and instead granted China permanent most favored nation trading status in 2001, along with its accession to the World Trade Organization.

China is largely an enigma, a black box by design. It’s simultaneously weak and strong:........

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