[JumpCrisscross]

> Why do you say China is unstable?

It's now a dictatorship, with a single man ruling for life. The history of dictatorships shows, for fundamental reasons, stability in the short term and chaos in the medium.

(The fundamental reasons include not being able to back away from bad decisions, eliminating competent rivals, and as a result bumbling into crises that seem to escalate themselves.)

[esoterica]

That’s a very ahistoric perspective. Many of the longest-lived and most successful empires throughput history have been monarchies and dictatorships. The current popularity of broadly democratic regimes is a very recent development in human history.

Even the US was very undemocratic for most of its history (remember when only white male landowners could vote?), and that didn’t stop its ascendancy to world superpower.

[Retric]

That’s less true the deeper you dig into history. Major political change doesn’t always make a big splash into history.

New leadership in a dictatorship often means a quiet realignment at the top. China tends to use the corruption excuse, but look at the upper leadership after such transitions and you find many new faces.

[Barrin92]

>It's now a dictatorship, with a single man ruling for life.

This is a cartoon take on China. Yes, China is led by a fairly Leninist party structure in nominal terms, but in terms of management China is relatively decentralised. Politically but in particular fiscally regional and local authorities manage day-to-day operations with significant leeway depending on the region, anything else would be unfeasible in a country with 1.4 billion people.

The bureaucratic nature of the Chinese state (which is really thousands of years old) makes comparisons to Western strongman dictatorships impossible. There's a reason the communist state has survived Mao, market reforms under Deng and now Xi, and it's not because it's run by some big brother figure who gets assassinated and then everything collapses.

[JumpCrisscross]

> China is led by a fairly Leninist party structure in nominal terms

China's party structure was fine and decidedly non-dictatorial. Deng was not a dictator and neither was Hu Jintao. They did not, like Xi has, ensconce themselves as leaders for life [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/xi-jinping-chi...

[Barrin92]

Nothing much about the party structure has changed. Xi doesn't get any more power than he has right now simply because of a term limit removal. Given how opaque and complex the power distribution inside the communist party is, Xi could have feasibly governed with a marionette in place without changing the term limits at all, just like Putin in Russia while Medvedev was in office.

China was certainly much more dictatorial than any Western country before this change, and it isn't much more dictatorial now. Xi's extension of time in office isn't really related to governance as much as it is related to the problem of succession. With significant amounts of the old guard finally reaching retirement age, there is a fear of political instability in the party.

[addicted]

Xi doesn’t have more power because of the term limits removal. But the fact that he was able to get the term limits removed was a public display of the power he has accumulated.

And the way he has done that is by imprisoning and killing competitors to his power. The fact that he could even contemplate bringing the term limit up indicated that he was certain at that point that there was no one to compete with him within the party, who would protest the term limits removal.

[Danieru]

I noticed you avoided mentioning at all Xi's power grab and now dictatorial status.