When it comes to public oversea sources for meaningful Chinese political watching, the unfortunate reality is that almost all of media (whether west or HK based) could be connected to some anti-CCP organizations if you were willing to dig deep enough.
From my personal experience, outside Chinese political watchers are mainly consisted of two types, those that got their start from the aftermath of June 4 incident (most of them eventually became associated with FLG media wing), and those that were allies or patrons of CCP officials who lost their own political struggles. Purely western analysts tend use them as sources anyway due to their own lack of nuanced understanding of Chinese language, culture and history.
I am of course excluding those china watchers that parrot standard CCP talking points because I could read them myself from domestic Chinese media. In other words, it is fairly difficult to find a politically "pure" but useful China watcher, someone that is not against CCP or its leaderships in anyway but offers something interesting. Since political discussions especially about senior inner party politics are more or less forbidden in mainland, those who still have personal/business interests would keep their disclosure to a minimum. You are very unlikely to get scoops from existing insiders anyway. As a result, I am willing to lower my personal reliability threshold for stories about CCP inner politics and use my own judgment.
As for track records, I think it's a tall order for any organization engaging in CCP political watching to possess a high accuracy rate. The party is very secretive when it comes to its inner workings. Also, CCP party politics are full of surprising developments that are not telegraphed. Before Bo's downfall, many predicted he was shoe-in for the premier position just as many predicted Cheng Liangyu (Shanghai party chief) would be protected by Jiang's clique. Two months ago, there was the surprising arrest of Fu Zhenghua who was the ex minster of justice and rumored to have played a significant role in taking down Zhou. Many thought Fu would be safe as he went into a second line posting last year.
As for the article itself, it did offer a few interesting takes on why Wang's tibet visit might be insignificant. I was not convinced but I appreciate the effort.
