My takeaway from China is democracy is less important than political competition. Between Mao and Xi, the CCP had the latter without the former. Today, America has the former and is struggling to keep the latter.

Yes agreed. But competition for what?

I'd say for the good of the majority of the people.

In other systems only those on top profit (maybe 10-20% max) even if they claim otherwise.

Thus democracy, through competition, aligns the leader's incentive with their people best.

> In other systems only those on top profit

Are you saying the US isn't doing that presently?

Yes. Mind you that like most things in life, it's a spectrum.

I think not. European colonialism was hardly a democratic project, and the extreme success of the US is attributable less to ideology and more to being an entire continent with a relatively tiny indigenous population that had not exploited any of its natural resources. Ideological/paradigmatic competition is not some neat controlled experiment where you can normalize existing conditions to unity and then draw conclusions from measuring subsequent growth; initial resource distributions make a massive difference and geography, while not the only factor, is highly determinative.

So you’re saying having a head start due to geography is all that matters?

If power differences can be explained by better access to resource and it’s only about head starts, China should have stayed the leading power.