China's Xi Jinping Having Health Isssues?

Hello, all, and welcome to Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026 — one day from Friday, which around here counts as a light at the end of the tunnel.

My calendar says it's Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, Pawpaw Day, Monte Cristo Day, Apple Dumpling Day, Professional House Cleaners Day, Voter Registration Day, Smithsonian Day, and International Country Music Day. So register to vote, thank your house cleaner, eat an apple dumpling with a Monte Cristo on the side, and reflect on the fact that the document making today possible got signed 239 years ago while nobody was worried about pawpaws at all.

Today in History:

1787: Delegates to the Constitutional Convention sign the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia.
1846: President James K. Polk signs the act establishing the Smithsonian Institution.
1862: Union forces repel a Confederate invasion of Maryland at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history.
1894: Japan defeats China at the Battle of the Yalu River during the First Sino-Japanese War.
1920: The American Professional Football Association, forerunner of the NFL, forms in Canton, Ohio.
1939: The Soviet Union invades Poland from the east, two weeks after Nazi Germany's invasion from the west.
1944: Allied paratroopers launch Operation Market Garden, landing behind German lines in the Netherlands.
1991: Twenty-one-year-old Linus Torvalds releases version 0.01 of the Linux kernel to the public.
2001: The New York Stock Exchange reopens for trading after the Sept. 11 attacks, its longest closure since the Great Depression.
2016: Bombs explode in Seaside Park, N.J., and Manhattan, injuring 31 people.
2018: The Trump administration imposes tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods, escalating the trade war with Beijing.

Birthdays Today include: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa); Phil Jackson, Basketball Hall of Fame coach; Cassandra Peterson, actress, better known as horror hostess Elvira; Baz Luhrmann, director (Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby); Alexander Ovechkin, NHL forward; Patrick Mahomes, NFL quarterback; and Narendra Modi, Indian prime minister.

If today's your birthday, too, you're sharing it with a senator, a coach with 11 championship rings, and a man who's scored more NHL goals than anyone alive.

* * *

(As an aside, it's interesting and a little scary, that last entry in Today in History and Narendra Modi's birthday showing up alongside today's piece. You'll see why as we go on. )

Gordon Chang is, without a doubt, one of the most vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party going. I've listened to plenty of his interviews over the years, mostly on radio — John Batchelor's show, back when Batchelor was on 77 WABC in New York City. John's doing podcasts these days, and if you've never checked his show out, you should.

As for Chang, he's among the most prolific authors and speakers on the China beat, and his track record for accuracy makes it hard to accuse him of being overly hard on Beijing — there's not much room to overshoot. So when he flags something, it's worth a look:

Xi Jinping is not well. This time, China could not hide his condition. https://t.co/WkoSUdPgmY

— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) September 15, 2026

The staff at World Tribune reports from the BRICS summit:

Modi stopped and turned towards Xi, who was in India for the first time in seven years to attend the summit. "Is it okay," Modi asked the translator accompanying the Chinese president. He repeated the question moments later. It was not immediately clear what had caused Xi's apparent discomfort.

They're also passing along a report from Wanjun Xie:

At the opening ceremony of the BRICS summit hosted by India, Xi Jinping suddenly felt unwell, his lips tightly pressed together, eyes firmly closed, face tense, head drooping, and body slumping into the chair, before abruptly fainting. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was speaking at the time, noticed Xi's sudden discomfort and immediately halted his remarks, repeatedly asking the staff, "Is it OK?" Xi was then moved outside the venue, where he received emergency treatment from his accompanying medical team. After his condition stabilized, he was forced to cut short his visit to India and returned to China early, even before the BRICS summit had concluded.

There are also rumors that Beijing mobilized troops from the Beijing Garrison District and the Central Theater Command into the capital the moment word got out, with residents online claiming to have seen troops all over the area inside the Second Ring Road. This suggests they’re taking precautions against a coup. That would be the reaction of a dictatorship (which China certainly is), to a perceived weakness.

Now, the honest disclosure that the original tweet skips over: Wanjun Xie isn't a neutral reporter. He's an exiled Chinese dissident who chairs an opposition group called the China Democrat Party — meaning he has every motive in the world to want this story to be true, which doesn't make it false, but it does mean "sourcing" and "wishful thinking" aren't automatically the same thing here. And the counterweight is real: International Business Times UK reports that neither Beijing nor New Delhi has confirmed any of it, and China's own official record shows Xi fully participating in both the September 12 and 13 sessions, delivering remarks and signing off on the New Delhi Declaration alongside everyone else. No stroke diagnosis, no 301 Hospital confirmation, no cancelled itinerary that anyone's independently verified.

All of which, as I say, in light of what we know of both China’s government and Chang’s accuracy record, either means nothing, or it’s nothing's neighbor.

Here's where this gets interesting: Xi Jinping is scheduled to make a formal state visit to Washington on September 24 — his first trip to the U.S. capital since 2015 and the reciprocal leg of a summit exchange that began with Trump's own state visit to Beijing back in May. Trump extended the invitation during that Beijing trip and reaffirmed the September date publicly in July. Xi will reportedly bring his wife, Peng Liyuan, along with a large CEO delegation — Beijing has apparently been pushing to bring a sizable business contingent, signaling this is as much a trade-and-investment event as a diplomatic one. Actually, I'd argue that over the last several years, they amount to the same thing. You'll understand why, I'm sure. 

On the agenda: Trump has flagged AI dominance as the marquee topic, calling it "probably the biggest thing anybody's ever seen" — high praise from a man who's called an awful lot of things the biggest anybody's ever seen — and framing the race for AI supremacy in stakes usually reserved for asteroid impacts: "whoever wins that race is probably going to win, period." Trade tensions, tariffs, and the fentanyl dispute that's been dogging this relationship since roughly the invention of small talk are also on the table, with Marco Rubio and Wang Yi already doing the diplomatic equivalent of fluffing the pillows for what Rubio's calling a "very positive visit" — because nothing says "very positive" like two countries that can't agree on chemical precursors sitting down to talk about who gets to run the robots.

Here's what makes this worth watching regardless of whether the fainting-goat rumor mill pans out: Trump says Xi is due in Washington on September 24, and Beijing — ever the picture of transparency — hasn't bothered confirming it. If Xi's health really is held together with duct tape and state secrets, that meeting is where the truth leaks out, whether the CCP wants it to or not.

Watch for a sudden "scheduling conflict," a video-call downgrade, or some hapless understudy getting wheeled out to shake Trump's hand in his place while he does his best impression of Joe Biden. Official silence from Beijing proves nothing on its own — silence is the CCP's entire personality — but if September 24 quietly evaporates into "rescheduled due to unforeseen circumstances," the rumor stops being a rumor and starts being a diagnosis.

Obviously, a change to the top of the Chinese hierarchy is of huge consequence in other areas as well. Xi getting replaced raises the possibility of more effort at Chinese expansion, beyond what Xi's been doing.

Again, official word out of China is hard to come by, particularly under conditions like these, so you could argue that none of it is happening. But knowing what I know about Gordon Chang pretty much negates the idea that these reports are false. Sept. 24 will be the tell. 

I'll be watching. 

Thought for the Day: A constitution signed by 39 men in a stuffy Philadelphia room in 1787 is still the operating system running the country — proof that some code just doesn't need a rewrite.

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Thanks for coming, and take care today, gang. Join us again tomorrow, won't you?

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