Taiwan News, established in 1949, recently carried an article saying President Xi's daughter, having graduated from Harvard in 2014, is now back there. And that it is likely for her own safety. The safe space movement at Harvard peaked in 2016 and is still doing things to make its students feel less threatened. But Xi Mingze would not feel threatened by old paintings of long -dead white men, as some other Harvard students are.

Her father charmed his way to the top job in China and once there consolidated his position by eliminating his rivals in an anti-corruption campaign. Then he had himself made president for life. The next step for a Chinese dictator would be to establish a dynasty. Chairman Mao had wanted to establish a dynasty, but his only son capable of the role, Mao Anying, was killed by a U.S. airstrike on November 25, 1950 during the Korean War.

For President Xi to start a dynasty, his only daughter has to get married. At 27, she is of the age when she should get married. But it can't be to someone of peasant stock. It has to be to one of China's princelings — or "Revolutionary Successors," as they prefer to be known. President Xi has stressed the need for "red genes" in China's rulers. The problem is that all the princelings are all already very wealthy, so marrying into the Xi family wealth would be of no consequence. China's princesses do well, too. The Huawei executive arrested in Canada, Meng Wanzhou, has a stepsister, Annabel Yeo, who had her debut into high society at Le Bal des Débutantes in Paris in November 2018.

For a princeling, if you married Xi's daughter, you would become consort to the empress, but there would be a downside: you would be killed in any palace coup.

If Xi Mingze is at Harvard, that suggests that the project to get her married off has had pushback and that President Xi isn't having things going all his way. Another problem with Xi establishing a dynasty is that all the other families living in the gated community in Beijing for China's elite, Zhongnanhai, would become less than equal, something that would stick in their craw more than the president-for-life thing.

The communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe lasted about 70 years before they burned out, and it has been wondered if the 70-year rule will also apply to China. The communist party in China recently celebrated 70 years since its founding, and it looks as if burnout is happening on cue. The princelings are jealous of the fortunes made by China's entrepreneurial class and have started to take their fortunes from them, starting with the likes of Jack Ma, who had founded Alibaba. Another Chinese billionaire, Miles Kwok, has predicted that Jack Ma will be either in prison or dead within a year. Once started, expropriation will work its way down through the economy, and it will be a profound productivity-killer.

A lot of China's managerial class now has at least part of its fortune offshore and has sent its children, often only one child, to foreign universities. Some of those children have been told, "Never come back to China."

Xi Mingze at Harvard means that a coup is possible in China.

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.