Human history has shown us that whomever controls the army usually wins.
Now, in the post-industrial era, we have a third threat. Extinction. And China may actually combine all three.
Money is the force of reason, ignoring it comes at one's own peril regardless of the force one controls: it means going against common sense that established itself through the power of competition, in favour of some arbitrary political theory or just someone's wits. Even if it succeeds for a while, it always reduces overall quality of the system and increases it's vulnerability.
Making payroll is never an issue for a sovereign that controls a central bank that controls their own currency. You're completely missing the point, because you're thinking in terms of money. A country isn't a business, or a household, it doesn't budget in the way you think.
> Money is the force of reason, ignoring it comes at one's own peril regardless of the force one controls:
Money is a floating-value paper proxy for material wealth. When there's a shortage of material prosperity - when people aren't building stuff, that's when you get a problem. Your position has just as many ideological blinders on as the one you think you are making arguments against.
The USSR collapsed because it failed to provide material prosperity. China, by any metric you could measure, is wildly succeeding at providing that material prosperity. That is what the party is focused on, because that's what's going to keep them in power.
You have to have bases of power, who are compensated and secured.
It's less stable, but doable with the right mix of alternatives, to ignore "the people" as one of those bases of power.
Soviet Union has collapsed while having whole lot more economic power and raw output of just about every industry, and was much more up to date technologically, but it deprived people of their basic instinct: to save and invest money and grow rich. Today's Russia allows and encourages that. Moreover, it even allows people say, to blatantly ignore taxes on all levels (i know people who make millions bucks per year in Russia and they don't know what tax number is, receiving and spending money through the banks in the open - and banks even help then when they need to make that money look legit abroad). As long as you don't try to oppose the great Pu or mess with politics overall, the regime has nothing against people enriching themselves - so the support base is rock solid and need for violence to maintain internal order is next to nonexistent.
Russia isn't democratic, but it is capitalist in the sense: you can own capital and government wants you to, and sees people who have capital as by default more well-behaved and loyal than those who don't. The sickest shit Putin may say on TV is shrugged by those people as "Pu just wants to make those peasants happy", and they may be even right.
Your description of Russia seems accurate, ~1995 to ~2010.
However, policies appear to be changing into tighter, more direct state control of oligarchs, in an effort to ensure civil stability.
Additionally, Putin is now 70... which is getting to the age that more laissez faire dictators turn increasingly autocratic in response to any external disturbances of their social control.
At some age and tiredness, it seems like the blunt approach trumps finessing a solution between multiple competing interests.
And... not to put too fine a point on it, but Putin did just survive a coup attempt, which wouldn't have launched if there weren't some support for it among the myriad power brokers in Russia.
They don't have voting power.
They don't have demonstration power.
They don't have access to mass media and free speech.
Short of outright rioting, there's little they can do that matters to the Russian government.
Which means than in a trade-off between {what the people want} and {what those with power want}, the people are going to be ignored.
> (and even has no problem with them exporting that wealth abroad)
"...discuss reintroducing some capital controls to help prop up the struggling rouble."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/16/putin-meeti...
The Soviet Union pissed half of its economy away into its military, and the other half into its particular brand of waste, inefficiency, and corruption. It had a shortage of housing, basic consumer goods, and appliances - a shortage of material wealth, which became untenable by the time the fourth post-war decade rolled around, and everyone started wondering why the country has 12,000 nuclear warheads, but is still so goddamn poor.
If material wealth weren't the problem, or if Gorbachev didn't decide to stop imprisoning people for complaining about it, it would still be around today.
The world's three meals away from anarchy, if there were serious material shortages in the US today, nobody would give a crap about what monetary policy it follows, or whether or not you can save. King Bread is a ruler you swear fealty to, compared to him, King Dollar is something that comfortable philosophers build elaborate arguments and temples to.
Are you aware of what happened to the landlords in China or do you mean the landlords weren't human?
Creating an all-encompassing historical 'rule' like 'money always wins' and then discounting evidence of a blatant counter-example is not generally a method that ends in good outcomes.
See: all major failed political movements based on an ideology that refused to adapt to conditions that did not line up with its dogma.
So far we can't see CCP making this mistake - which sort of confirms that Party has a healthy self-preservation instinct. Let's say, they are trying to do everything to avoid collapse of real estate prices because that will hit retirement savings of too many people, and they seem to accept lower rates of economic growth if that will be necessary to achieve that.