It is my belief that China’s desire for access to islands around the world is to harvest nuclear warheads in secret away from their mainland. This way, when China is done biding their time, they will be ready to show their strength to the “enemy troops…. outside the walls.”

I always looked up to Bismarck as the greatest statesman ever—a foreign policy genius who knew exactly what political moves to make, how to calculate each move, and how each move would play out. A part of me read the books in hopes that I would understand the “secret sauce” that made him such a foreign policy genius, and I found it.

Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is one of the greatest books I have read in my life. Sometimes I would just shake my head and pause my reading because I had to think about whether Huntington was some sort of fortune teller given how eerily accurate his prediction of the 21st century geopolitical landscape was when he published his book back in 1996.

If one had to compare Xi Jinping with any of his predecessors, the only comparison should be with Mao Zedong. Whereas Mao’s strategy for China was based on continual revolution, Xi’s leadership strategy is based on continual corruption and the need to rid the Communist Party of it. Hence Xi’s amendment of the Constitution in 2018 to abolish the two-term limit on the presidency—if he leaves, then the corruption will only continue, or so goes Xi’s rationale.

My favorite part about On China is that I felt like a fly on the wall amongst some of the world’s most powerful individuals and their conversations, as the outcome of these conversations would go on to shape geopolitics until our present day.