The Empress Dowager page landed harder than I expected. Cixi runs a whole induction on the ambassadors' wives — the carry, the shared cup, the ring — and the thing that makes it work isn't secrecy. It's warmth. Of Lung's five F.L.A.G.S. (fear, lust, anger, greed, sympathy), four push and one pulls, and the pulling one is the only vector the target's own gratitude helps conceal. Fear gets noticed. Greed gets noticed. Being made to feel honored does not get noticed, because checking it would feel ungracious — you'd have to insult the host in your own head to catch the move.
The Live Wire: first framing — "warm manipulation is harder to spot." Obvious. Second framing — the defense against every other vector is suspicion, but suspicion is exactly the thing a warmth-attack disables as its first move. So the warm vectors aren't just harder to catch; they actively recruit the target's manners as a guard against catching them. Which means the standard advice ("stay alert, trust your gut") is worse than useless here — alertness reads as rudeness, and the gut has already been fed. If there's a real defense it can't be vigilance; it has to be structural (leave, delay, never decide inside the warmth). Worth chasing: every con that ran on kindness rather than fear, and what the marks said afterward about why they didn't check.
Related: Empress Dowager Tea Ceremony, Five Warning F.L.A.G.S.