It's maybe a good segue to a final question. And I realize we're just skimming the surface of this very rich book. So obviously the message to listeners is you have to go out and buy this. This is just a short preview. But I do think the book gets into a lot of the key questions and policy challenges folks or policymakers are dealing with as they try to understand the decision-making process of in China's case an increasingly opaque political system. You just mentioned lessons learned. One of the big questions now is around how China is processing Putin's invasion of Ukraine and what it tells China about resilience and stamina of the US, NATO, and Europe, what it tells China about the possible reaction to a Chinese action on Taiwan, would there be sanctions? So there's a whole big set of questions around lessons learned. I wanted to ask you, without knowing, well, first of all, do you have a take on that? But more importantly, from an epistemological sense, how should we think about that question of what is authoritarian regime X learning about event Y? My own bias is a slight bit of skepticism. Usually when someone says the lesson China is learning from the war in Ukraine is X, what I think they're saying is, here's what I think they should be learning. Or here's what I'd like you to think they're learning because it advances my agenda. So how do you think about this issue of lessons learned and states' capacity to effectively learn lessons? Yes.

Well, I mean, with regard to the specific issue of what China is learning from the war in Ukraine, I think it's too early to know because we have an event which is still in process, the war hasn't ended, we don't know how it will end, and lessons learned once the event has fully unfolded. On that, I think time will tell, and eventually we will know what lessons China learned. On the other issue of do states learn, they do, if the event is of significantly large magnitude. So to go back to the example of the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, this is one instance where China did draw a lesson, an important lesson about the possibility of regime collapse and then the steps that need to be taken to avoid that. In other cases, perhaps learning is slower or it's harder for us as scholars to demonstrate because a large part of this book focuses on how do we know how authoritarian regimes work and how decision making takes place in autocruses. And my argument is that we need to look at the right sources, we need to look at the sources that authoritarian incumbents looked at themselves rather than at sources that autocruses decide to circulate publicly and in those types of sources, circulate publicly for other reasons in order to manage public perceptions of the regime. So when it comes to these lessons, I think our capacity to know whether a lesson has been learned hinges to a large extent on having access to the right sources. And this type of access emerges slowly, if at all. Sometimes we never have access to the right sources, so we engage in a lot of

guesswork.