[itmayno]

The native citizens will come to HN and offer some rationalization. The non citizens will offer others. The reason is very simple. The dictator is paranoid about losing control and getting killed. Simple as that.

Long version: when you are facing internal party conflicts, alliance between US-UK-Japan-Australia-India-Taiwan-South Korea-EU which accounts for 90% of worlds wealth and war power 10x the magnitude and is against you, floods that gets worse every year, extreme heatwave that will eventually make Shanghai unlivable, delta Covid lockdowns, capital flight, demographic crisis, supply chain moving out, internal resistance from Hong Kong and tibet and xinjiang, and young generation lying flat. You are paranoid as hell and afraid to lose control so as to not get killed.

[dash2]

This is the basic story that Acemoglu and Robinson tell: ultimately, inclusive political institutions (their rather fluffy term for liberal democracy) will win because they allow for creative destruction and renewal in the economy. Dictatorship never creates lasting economic growth, because the dictator is supported by the status quo elites, who eventually become dinosaurs.

I'm not sure I believe it, but it's a bold prediction and worth thinking about.

[logimame]

And the alliance countries you've listed are also suffering from those exact same problems (climate change, Covid lockdowns, capital flight, demographic crisis, deindustrialization, widespread unrest, a hopeless young generation). And debatably, some of them have much worse on some fronts than China.

I do think that every country in this world, whether it be the US, China, or my country, are experiencing the same effects from the current configuration of global capitalism (environmental destruction, extreme inequality, housing crisis, cutthroat job competition, long working hours, alienation, depression), and the only thing it's different is how state governments are responding to the crisis. Out of all the governments in the world, China seems ahead of some Western countries in a few aspects (as a one-party state being able to control and crack down on a lot of things and enable strict policies against over-financialization and deindustrialization). However, I still do think that China's strong state measures are only a stopgap measure for the more fundamental political and philosophical problems that the entire world has right now.

[itmayno]

Sure some countries have some of the same problems, I don’t disagree. However, the magnitude of the problem is 10x worse for China. Remember that China is still extremely poor - 600M lives on $100/month. And another 500M lives on $1000/month. All this is the party’s doing, and the people won’t forget it. So when things goes bad like it is now for China, it will go really bad for its dictator.

Also other countries prob don’t have the problem of “what if the dictator was killed or dies early, and civil war and political struggle ensues”

[desert_boi]

Not quite the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-Nation_Alliance.