The fall of empires preys on Xi Jinping’s mind 

By late January China had emerged from a tsunami of covid-19 infections that began to crash over the country a few weeks earlier, after the lifting of nearly three years of draconian pandemic controls. Officials were covering up the horrific scale of the wave’s lethality, but most people’s lives were returning to normal. The Communist Party felt the time was right to publish a speech by Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader, that he had delivered a year earlier, as the economy reeled from the impact of his “zero-covid” policy. It was not about the crisis at hand, but about history.