Xinanigans
China and strategic competition, read from the inside out.
What Is Xinanigans?
Xinanigans is Cypher Strategies’ public analysis of China and strategic competition, written by Erika Lafrennie. It is the Governance Warfare framework applied in the open, week by week: which developments changed the conditions that matter, why, and what they may set in motion next.
It reads governing logic, elite decision-making, and institutional change as the terrain they are, and it reads the party, the economy, and the PLA as administrative systems. The question is never only what happened. It is what the terrain now allows.
While others report on what China did, Xinanigans asks what it tells us about what comes next.
The Record
Every edition is dated, and the calls are checked against what happened. Through the summer of 2025, prevailing analysis read China’s economic strain as restraint. Xinanigans read the new export-licensing architecture as retaliation capacity under construction, about three months before it was used in the most sweeping retaliation of the trade war.
Who It’s For
Intelligence and national-security professionals
Planners and strategists tracking long-duration competition
Institutional leaders exposed to governance-layer risk
Readers who understand that headlines lag systems