[osdiab]

They did have many governments and coups in the last 150 years, and they didn’t lead to incrementally better situations, but instead turmoil and foreign exploitation. I’m not Chinese and I can’t speak for their decisions, but it sounds like you don’t know the historical context and assume that Western liberalism always leads to positive ends - which, given our catastrophic interventions around the world, doesn’t seem to be the case.

EDIT: to be clear, nobody is saying what they did is moral. But what I am saying is that the results of such an uprising was not guaranteed to be peaceful, orderly, nor lead to better outcomes; and furthermore you can make the argument that the success of modern Chinese governance has been one of the greatest triumphs of poverty alleviation and human development in all of human history. So to claim with such conviction that that branch of history would be the better option smacks of ignorance to me.