More on June Politburo meeting; Stabilizing employment; Trump's threat to bomb Beijing; EU's mindset needs "rebalancing"; TikTok

Summary of today’s Essential Eight:

1. On last week’s Politburo meeting and all those Xi rumors - Dr. Holly Snape has written an excellent piece examining Politburo’s discussion of the “Regulations on Party Centre Decision Making, Discussion and Coordinating Body Work”:

Speculation about the June politburo meeting readout is feeding rumours of Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s ‘weakening’ hold on power. The readout announced that the politburo had reviewed new ‘Regulations on Party Centre Decision Making, Discussion and Coordinating Body Work’ [‘党中央决策议事协调机构工作条例’].

This speculation hangs on two ideas. The wilder of the two is that some elusive group of actors has decided to establish a new body above Xi. This is based on a misreading of the first line of the readout – a boilerplate introduction to the topic at hand, not a declaration of a new power centre being established. The second is that these regulations are designed to rein in Xi’s power by placin…