I’ve travelled and worked fairly extensively in the PRC and as best I can tell, there is the real possibility that regionalism, ethnic and socio/economic differences will ultimately do to China what was done to the USSR. You have got North/South, Urban/Rural, numerous ethnic groups and tribalism that has been bottled up but is just waiting to bubble to the surface.
China is simply not some monolith populated with homogeneous peoples.
No it's not. But, for about three thousand years it has had these groups under the control of one dynasty or another.
IMHO, China is on the verge of imploding.
Their population basis is a majority of people under the age of 35.
While “religion” is banned, most of the Chinese continue to be Buddism.
The average young Chinese looks at Taiwan and Hong Kong and can’t figure out why they and their families are working 24/7 and housed in hell-hole shelters to build the grand monuments for the Olymics in Bejing, Shainghai and Dalian while they and their fellow country men are starving.
I agree. China is basically a Roman empire that never fell apart. A Roman empire without nationalism - not the faux nationalism of today's China, but the same kind of nationalism that tore the European empires apart. The kind of nationalism that would see East Turkistan restored to the Turks, Tibet to the Tibetans, "Inner" Mongolia to the Mongols, Yunnan, Kwangsi and Kweilin to its natives, Canton province to speakers of Cantonese and even Shanghai, Soochow and Hangchow reverting to speakers of the Wu language.
And the ChiComs have seen this threat. For 2 generations they have been settling Han Chinese in non-Han territory.