What led to the American Revolution was a lack of much governance by Britain of the colonies for generations, which led to the establishment of self-governance. When eventually the King didn't have enough money and needed to levy more taxes on the colonies, the new ruling class revolted. The American Revolution was not a revolution in the sense that France had or that we typically talk about. It was a War of Secession. Comparing it to attempts to overthrow the ruling class in one's own country is not appropriate. It was war to shake off a foreign oppressor from the other side of the world.

The taxes the King wanted to levy were relatively minor. The ruling class hypothesis doesn't explain why they would launch an expensive and dangerous revolution over a few minor taxes, nor does it explain the revolution's support from the people and intelligentsia. In fact, the rich and powerful tended Loyalist, and many of the top Revolutionaries weren't exactly landed gentry.

There's great danger in the Marxoid tendency to see everything in terms of economics and social class. Leaving aside its obvious failures in practical matters, this tendency discounts many real human emotions and often leads one to topsy-turvy assumptions compared to what actually happened.

Sure, but there's nothing stopping the same dynamic from playing out in China (or the current U.S, for that matter). What happens if the economic elites in Shanghai or Shenzhen decide that their interests have diverged from Beijing and that they'd be better off with self-governance? Their economic engines are fueled as much by Western multinational investment as by Beijing, anyway.

I think the main thing to focus on isn't that there's a direct correlation between economic growth and political liberalization, but rather a "genie out of the bottle" effect where societies will consistently mobilize to preserve their new standard of living, which props up and exaggerates political forces believed to provide that standard of living. Sometimes this leads to civil liberties, other times it leads towards nationalist or imperialist sentiment. But history shows that our tendency is to take on increased complexity as a way of getting something for everyone: regulated markets and civil liberties are both modes of complexification.

A lot of the big shifts happen during a crisis: Europe's social democracies, the liberalized markets of Japan and South Korea, the USA as superpower: all of those were forged from the global crisis conditions of World War II and have only gradually drifted off their various trajectories.

And, to the extent that the world has a crisis now(and we have a whole bunch of events conceivable as crisis scenarios), it isn't going to resemble the last one: the premises are different, and the means of resolution are likely to be different too.

That's a big "if". So far it seems like a unified China puts them at an economic advantage since they have the muscle to drive beneficial trade agreements through. So long as the ruling party keeps them all placated they'll have no reason to defect.

The response cycle for the Chinese government is vastly shorter than what King George's government was dealing with.

China is pretty big, and for some citizens the ruling party may as well be on the other side of the world.

But uniquely among all countries, they're very likely to be of the same ethnic group, and speak the same language as their rulers. You certainly cannot say that of Brazil, Russia, hell even of the US.

Han Chinese is by far the largest ethnicity on Earth - I've always wondered how that impacts Chinese sentiment and history.

As much as China has a dominant ethnicity, this is only really true in the eastern, core parts of China. In the Northern and Western fringes, plus Tibet, there's entirely unrelated groups of people who, at times, want nothing to do with Beijing.

There are countries with more ethnic cohesion, though they tend to be smaller: Iceland for example. Any larger country either came about by annexing smaller ones, or was sufficiently valuable enough that it was colonized at some point.

The problem is a lot can change if we going to give China nearly a century for political change.

A lot of countries today are starting to look not to Western democracies as examples/role models of success but to China. Even in existing democracies, it is not surprising that the recent populist/nationalist movements arguing for isolationism, economic-nationalism, increased government control stem out of a world where China is the shining beacon of consistent 5%+ economic growth.

By the time China should change, they might have already reshaped the world such that they don't need to change.

Change is not imposed from outside. It's just that increased wealth and trade in the end always results in increased liberalism, tolerance and freedom.

But it doesn't. Even the US is moving away from liberalism. Consider the increasing restrictions on and fading support for freedom of speech, the most fundamental of liberal values.

Yeah, that's the other side of the coin: Decreasing prosperity leads to decreasing liberalism, and in many US and EU regions prosperity is decreasing with predictable political consequences.

The authoritarians of the day don't have a lot of supporters in NY, SF, London or Paris. It's the US flyover states and French mining towns that are turning away from liberalism.