[jollybean]

"Autocracies "do as they please", which can take them to great height"

History informs that by and large, autocracies are exceedingly slow and inneficient, and tend to perform well only in periods of post-trauma with acute nationalism and oversight/economic aid from friendly partners. And when there was some kind of civilization there previously.

The reconstruction of Japan and Korea after WW2/Korean War were exemplary of this but they had a lot of key favourable conditions.

One could argue that China's recent development is frankly just a delayed post-WW2 kind of rejuvenation but they'll get diminishing marginal returns on authoritarianism as leaping ahead of other systems is much harder than doing the obvious of building new bridges and roads.

And over the last 6 years China has increased centralized control even further.