You don’t have to be a China watching political historian to recognise the accuracy of the observation that China has become a “brittle autocracy”, as one of our most gifted Sinologists, Geremie Barme, formerly of the Australian National University, puts it.

Brittle, for course, means hard but liable to break.

Barme was referenced by Greg Sheridan in a Weekend Australian analysis of today’s China and our relationship with it — now and into a dangerous future — last Saturday.