This is CBS, I On the World.

I'm John Batchel with Gregory Copley, my mentor and colleague, Defense and Foreign Affairs.

Beijing, unusually quiet.

It always reminds me of the dog that's not barking story in Sherlock Holmes, one of the great ones.

A dog that didn't bark. Why? Gregory, the silence is not calming. China has hunger, and the hunger

is in all directions, but chiefly to sustain power, especially Xi Jinping. Why suddenly is he not

commenting or not moving in some fashion, knowing that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin are talking directly?

What's up? Well, I just wrote a lengthy piece about this called the loud, clear messaging from Beijing's

silence.

We've not seen this degree of calm and silence out of Beijing for a long time.

It doesn't mean that she's not active.

He's maneuvering in small ways to get his people in place to do things. But basically, he has been essentially cornered by the older

cadre and senior leaders of the Communist Party of China, despite the fact that she had attempted

to eliminate physically all of his key opponents. He hasn't been able to do that. In fact, he was

never going to be able to do it because he had alienated all of the princelings, his own class of

generation of Communist Party junior cadre, if you like, have now come up through the ranks.

He alienated all of them because he took away all their privileges.

He basically destroyed the marketplace which Dong Xiaoping was able to stimulate after the death of Mao Zedong.

And we see she living in an antique form of Maoism, which has basically led the PRC to bankruptcy.

All of this massive wealth built up by China has been fritted away.

So now the party has got him cornered.

He has been reportedly one, possibly two strokes over the past year.

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