then it goes back to power being split among a few different offices, like they had before Xi, until the party consolidates behind someone, Xi wasn’t a designated successor either.

china’s one of the rare cases of a real party authoritarianism, of which the others are mostly some communist dictatorships, or the institutional despotism of the PRI—namely, that they are internally-coherent political systems with legitimate rules that are capable of outliving individual rulers

will china’s system eventually fail? yeah, but i don’t think it’s super likely to be from a succession crisis unless a successor tries playing the populism card and it gets out of hand. a lot of china’s structural issues are more of a “this will pop up eventually” rather than tied to Xi’s heartbeat.