It takes many years to reach this conclusion. I have a somewhat similar background. In the early 2000s, I naively assumed the US intelligence community already knew what Jack is saying about China. Based on that, I figured our politicians and business leaders had been briefed; that they knew the score. The truth was, it took the US government and Western elite longer to figure this out than many Western individuals who had actually lived in China and learned the language. I am not blaming anyone, just pointing out that elites in the West and probably everywhere are no smarter or insightful than ordinary people. Indeed, as a group, elites often behave stupidly. They are held together by psycholinguistic codes and mutual dependency, so they all tend to think alike or form factions that do. Their deep misunderstanding of China can be seen in many other areas — their failure to form an alliance with Russia after the fall of the SU, the Ukraine War, mass third-world immigration, the covid psyop mingled with the incongruous fantasy that deep down all people are the same and all of them will treat you well if you treat them well, and so on. Intel services would do much better if they listened to were led by people who have had real-life ordinary experience in whatever area they want to understand. I am a proud conspiracy theorist, but the examples above show that much of our predicament as citizens (of any nation) is our elites are poorly informed, selfishly tied to each other, and as such stupid. Yes, they do conspire against us and cause great harm but they do that stupidly as well. ABN