Maybe, but I tend to trust 中沢克二. He has a fairly successful track record on reporting on Chinese elite politics, and Japanese reporting on China is fairly high quality given the economic interdependence along with naval tensions between the two and certain irredentist sentiments around Ryukyu.
That said, stuff is absolutely different in the CMC and MOFA today - I don't think similar churn at that level has been seen since the 1980s.
That said, this should NOT be construed as "Chinese Collapse". That said, this is exactly how succession works in authoritarian countries. We saw similar confusion in China during the 2009-12 period [0]. Fourth plenums be wonky
That said, stuff is absolutely different in the CMC and MOFA today - I don't think similar churn at that level has been seen since the 1980s.
That said, this should NOT be construed as "Chinese Collapse". That said, this is exactly how succession works in authoritarian countries. We saw similar confusion in China during the 2009-12 period [0]. Fourth plenums be wonky
[0] - https://research.nus.edu.sg/eai/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/B...