What if Xi Jinping is suddenly incapacitated?
Xi's sudden incapacitation opens a CCP succession crisis: VIX spikes globally, China-beta and semis sell on policy-vacuum and Taiwan-tail fears, and the yuan weakens. Closest analogue is the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown that crashed Hong Kong equities and froze the market. Transmission: China is the marginal buyer for global commodities and a core link in tech supply chains, so the shock is global. Forward angle: an opaque, factional CCP transition has no orderly 25th-Amendment equivalent, so the uncertainty premium is stickier than a Western-leader shock.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Xi Jinping suddenly dies or is incapacitated, opening a Chinese succession crisis. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · China growth ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.