And so Scott, people were out in the streets all over China and Beijing and Shanghai and elsewhere, they're doing this at great risk, aren't they?

They certainly are. It's unclear how large these protests are in any individual site. You know, it seems maybe a few hundred people but what is really impressive is that this is occurring in multiple cities simultaneously about the exact same issue about ending zero-COVID. It appears the protesters' central demands are around ending zero-COVID and moving to a post-pandemic era as fast as possible. That seems to be what everyone is demanding. But as your question implies and as we're seeing in some of these places, folks are calling on demands for the party to step down or Xi Jinping to step down for freedom. Like give me freedom or give me death. You've seen things like that. Now it's unclear how widespread those types of demands are but it's certainly quite visible and should give the leadership pause that it's going to be really challenging to really satisfy these protesters particularly anytime soon.

But do these protests and this, you know, I guess we can call it an uprising at this point to some degree, do they present a real threat to Xi Jinping?

Not yet. I still think we're far short of anything that threatens his hold on power or the Communist Party's hold on power. We're nowhere near where they were in 1989. The demands are primarily really around the specific policy set which could be addressable. The protesters have couched this to some extent around norms about freedom but really what they want is just their normal lives back. And then I think that would be sufficient for the vast majority of them. The big challenge for Xi Jinping is he could end zero COVID fast or he could end it safely. But he can't do both. If you do it fast, if you just eliminated the restrictions, you'd have a big rise in cases and serious illness and death. If you do it safely, that's going to take many months to do it properly because you've got to vaccinate a lot larger percentage of the population, prepare ICUs and hospitals to deal with more sick people, etc. It's going to take longer. So what the challenge is, the risk is that the pace at which they deal with the demands goes more slowly than the pace of the demands increasing. So this is going to be a competition about whether they can address the protesters' demands more quickly than the protesters increase their demands. And so that's a real challenge because as we've talked before, Xi Jinping does not like to back up and people also don't like to give Xi Jinping bad news and they don't like him to tell things he doesn't want to do. So they're really pushing on Xi Jinping's hot buttons on things he doesn't want to do. And so really, we may see some modification in policies, but we're more likely to see some harsher tactics by the regime if these folks don't go back home and get off the streets. And then really, you could have a more combustible situation, particularly if there's any significant loss of life in those kinds of conflicts.