When Xi Jinping took office in 2013, I—like many
others—hoped that his leadership would improve China's
trajectory. But over time, my optimism faded as the country became
more repressive, and the spaces I once enjoyed began to
disappear.
I was living in Shenzhen in 2013. Whenever I read Western media
hopes that Xi might potentially be China's Gorbachev, I
recalled one of my courses at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI)
in Virginia, which among other topics covered cable-writing (a
cable is basically a report, in the State Department's fusty
parlance). In one class, a 2000 cable from the Moscow Embassy was
hailed as the epitome of what good reporting from the field looks
like. The topic was Vladimir Putin's recent ascension to power,
and the reporting officer made the bold claim (based on a careful
analysis of Putin's track record) that he would be a reformer.
To be fair to FSI instructors, I took the course in 2004, when it
was not quite as clear that the cable's
