[Originally a Twitter exchange.]

What might be a hypothetical, plausible line of intelligence reporting about either the foreign or domestic situation that would be risky to deliver to Xi, because it might anger him or because he might reflexively distrust it?

I myself don’t have any great answers! I think it’s hard because there’s not a lot of information about what specific policy issues Xi feels he is personally responsible for, or questions of fact that he feels strongly about (but which might be wrong)

I can imagine that there would be different categories of potential answers to the question. One category might be derogatory information - like reporting that Xi’s foreign counterparts were privately denigrating him or contemptuous of him. Some leaders are prickly about that sort of thing.

But when it comes to more strategic issues, I don’t know. He might have trouble believing reports that contradicted his suspicion about the US and worldview that international politics is fundamentally a struggle. For example, if a source said something like “Jake Sullivan genuinely only wants to protect a narrow slice of technology and doesn’t intend to more broadly crimp China’s economic development” or, if this were 1999, “the US genuinely bombed our embassy in Belgrade by accident.”

On the domestic front, I’m not sure. Maybe reports that indicated that zero COVID was a mistake or failure would’ve been risky to deliver but I’m not positive what tactical intelligence would have equated to that unwelcome strategic message. “The people of Shanghai are boiling over because they’ve been locked down too long”? I’m not sure that would’ve been read as a reason to change course. “There might be spontaneous nationwide demonstrations about this issue?” That’s too speculative and might be an indictment of the very intelligence service delivering that message.