Great comments, thanks, I have spent many hours developing my smoothing and polishing procedures, nephrite can be extremely challenging, there are three locations in my region that I source my jade from and they all require slightly different methods, the jade in this carving is very fine grain does not splinter or laminate but can still undercut- orange peel, I finished smoothing on 600 carbide then changed to 1200 diamond, diamond up to 50K.
I polished on Linde A on hard cow hide leather, keeping it slightly moist in our little bench laythe, small diameter leather wheel I made myself, the 50K diamond polished good but the Linde A gave it that extra shine, many jade carvers finish difficult nephrite on 600 to 1200 silicon carbide dry by hand, gives a satin finish, hand sanding and smoothing is a much better method than any power tool as all your lines and curves look better.
No one method will work on all nephrite, the higher the polish the more your faults show, on some nephrite I have back tracked to 1200 carbide dry as it looked better with a satin finish, orange peel shows out heaps less on a satin carbide finish than on fine grit diamond and Linde a, I can usually tell if it will take a high polish when I reach the 3000 grit stage, I let the jade dictate to me what method I will use, hope this helps.