“There is also a sense in China from what happened a 100 years ago that if there is no strong central authority China becomes a collection of war lord ruled states.”
I agree - what’s keeping China whole is a very strong central government. If they were to become “democratic” I could see the place splintering into many states, given the various ethnic groups, languages and religions.
One has to give the rulers there a lot of credit for being wise enough to keep the masses reasonably happy and create pride in their country with the economic progress and, as a result, military and world influence that they’ve achieved. They’ve also given them a lot more freedom than they’ve had in the past.
It’s a pretty good facsimile of a benevolent dictatorship.
Of course people’s needs change, and there will come a time when their needs will include more direct say on how they’re governed. That will be the big challenge for the regime when the time comes.
I’ve heard it said that Marxist ideology states that human history runs in stages-Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and finally Communism, which is supposedly a classless utopia where the state “withers away”, the one where there’s no private property. In any of the “Communist” nations, did the state ever show signs of “withering away”? I suspect that all “Communist” nations would say that they were actually at the Socialist stage of development, not the Communist one. After all, the Soviet Union was called the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics, not the Union of Soviet COMMUNIST Republics. The Chinese leadership, I suspect, may well say that they were at the Socialist state, and could thus afford to be pragmatic economically. But I digress.