FOR decades there had been a tendency to mistake China's strengths for vulnerabilities. Over the past year that paradigm has been inverted.

Analysts, politicians and businessmen are sometimes blinded by the size and lustre of the Chinese edifice and are failing to see its cracks.

The Chinese state has an unrivalled capacity to harness wealth and protect its privileges through its impressive security and propaganda systems. Those capabilities, if they continue unchecked, will become its fatal flaws.

On Monday, the Herald's Vanda Carson reported that the owners of 73-75 Wolseley Road, Point Piper, want to knock down the 100-year-old harbourside mansion they bought for $32.4 million and replace it with something bigger.

The story was about a suburban Australian property dispute. And yet Chinese journalists and bloggers immediately translated and spread it all over the Chinese media and internet. The reason became apparent in Tuesday's Herald where we identified the mystery mansion owners as Jiang Mei, a dancer-turned-property construction magnate, and her "princeling" husband, Zeng Wei. Zeng's father, Zeng Qinghong, is a very powerful man.