IMO, the hope that trade and economics would bring democracy to China was delusional from the start. It's the same sort of flag-waving idiocy that assumed toppling Saddam would turn Iraq into the Middle Eastern equivalent of post-war Japan. The US has basically permanently nerfed its own global hegemony barely 2 decades after defeating its only major adversary (the Soviet Union), all because of the idealistic aspirations of flag-waving ideologues that triumphed over pragmatic realists and cynics.