For what is worth many dicators had "golden" years. The issue is that at some point you get a bad dictator(or the current one turns bad) and you have to live with him your entire life. Not to mention that even within the golden period you still have freedoms taken away but that's a different story/trade off.

China isn't ultimately ruled by a dictator but by a party. You seem to think that the party would allow an incompetent person to assume the top position and stay there, which I don't see evidence for.

That was true until Xi Jinping removed term limits and ran his corruption campaign that imprisoned and beheaded his competition.

It looks like you don't understand how one party systems work. Just look at Trump and GOP and consider this is a democracy. Once he got the power the whole party(with few exceptions/undesirables that would be eliminated if it were a one party system) got behind him regardless if they liked him or his policies. There was bone to chew and they didn't want to loose it.

If things go south there are plenty to blame(i.e China, Russia, EU, rebels, etc). It is never the leader to blame. As the party leader controlls the police and the millitary there are really very few that would dare to consider a coup/leader change.

Even North Korea's Kim is "officially" supported by his party members but we already know what happens when they question him.

FWIW I really hope that you are right, a somewhat democratic and more collaborative China would be such a great partner to have, developing advanced tech and stimulating the fight against climate change.

It's only a dream, but it could be so beautiful.

That’s Chinese people’s dream in 80s then a lot of things happened...

China's political system is nothing that a good old style capitalistic bust can't take out in a decade or so. The USSR never recovered from the inflationary late 70s. Japan's state-induced credit boom economy never recovered from the early 90s deflationary bust. Dictatorships/state controlled economies are still economies.

As Hyman Minsky would agree - there's only one way to handle volatility, take it in your face. You can't suppress it.

>You have to admit that China in the last 20 years has been an absolute growth machine. I often see it argued that it's "fake" because the party subsidizes a lot of economic ventures, but even then they are building one hell of a domestic market.

It's not so much "they're pumping the numbers by cooking the books", it's more of the regime being at the right place at the right time. Other east asian countries industrialized at the same time without the CCP, for instance.

this is disingenuous, the scale is incomparable. why is india behind china then, if all it took was time?

It’s a weak third world economy that is modernizing. Of course the growth is tremendous. The west (and Japan/Korea) went through this in the 19th and 20th centuries, this will happen all over the world this century across Africa and Asia. You can’t give too much credit for growth in comparison to the rest of the world when the backdrop is being behind. There are over a billion smart people to draw from, it’s just inevitable and draws from the strength of Chinese culture before mao suppressed it with the cultural revolution when schools were destroyed. This is in spite of the authoritarianism, and based on Hong Kong and Taiwan, would have happened decades ago without it

Case in point: Putin. Authoritarian but he simply fucked the whole country with his isolationist, antagonistic decisions.

Not a lot of that could be credited to dictator for life Xi though.

In fact, by making himself basically dictator in life he has added the potential for tremendous instability in Chinese politics that did not exist before he took those actions.

Chinas growth is mostly due to the handiwork and frameworks set out by Deng Xiaoping. It’s easy to look successful coming in when the long-term investments his admin made starts to sprout.

You can use this logic with Stalin and Lenin, too. They went from a agrarian feudal society to a world superpower, helping defeat the Nazis and being the first in spaceflight.

Of course, you'd have to be wearing rose-colored glasses to take that portrayal at face value, and you'd also have to ignore significant atrocities the leaders were responsible for.