How to Make Judgments in a Pilo-Pake Authoritarian System

I was thinking, how would we know what information a leader relies on to make judgments in a pileo-pake authoritarian system? And I also take an issue of lessons learned from the war in Ukraine and what they teach Xi Jinping on Taiwan. Do you have any methodological sort of shortcuts to help make some of those approximations? Sure. There's actually two questions there. The first is about the methodology I use and the second is: How would we apply such a method to contemporary questions about Xi's judgments?