I agree with your starting premise about Xi and your concluding advice about independent (or at least, non-Party filtered) information. But I don't think it's

I agree with your starting premise about Xi and your concluding advice about independent (or at least, non-Party filtered) information. But I don't think it's wise or diplomatic to phrase it as a growing "intelligence" deficit in Chinese people. That word is tricky enough to define as it is, but people can hold deeply one-sided views about a lot of things and still be highly intelligent. As a counterpoint, browsing social media in open information societies and liberal democracies these days gives a sense that people can be extremely biased and polarized even without living in a closed propaganda information ecosystem. With that criticism lodged, I agree with the spirit of your argument that a more filtered public discourse very likely makes it monotonically incrementally harder to patch any present or future social discord.