The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan says China is acquiring all the instability of a “paranoid dictatorship”, following the disappearance of Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu. “Under Mao, it was a really dreadful tinpot dictatorship,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “And then Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping tried to institutionalise leadership, make it more stable and sensible, term limits, divided power,” Mr Sheridan said. “Xi is not as unstable as Vladimir Putin but getting rid of the Defence Minister follows a big purge in the so-called rocket force which is their whole nuclear weapons division. “So all the top leaders of that have been chucked out, some of them apparently have gone to jail – there’s tremendous instability at the top of Chinese politics at the moment.”