I think it's very underrated that it happens, though it's not worth relying on. More to the point is that China is running on a lot of very unsustainable models all at once.
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And Xi has consolidated so much power that China doesn't have a successor
aug 16, 2025, 1:56 am • 0 0 • view
eh, china’s system has demonstrated a real ability to deal with succession, they’ve handled many leadership transitions before, and the system of party leadership pre-Xi wasn’t actually that old
aug 16, 2025, 2:19 am • 0 0 • view
Problem is there is no successor
aug 16, 2025, 2:20 am • 0 0 • view
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.
aug 16, 2025, 2:23 am • 0 0 • view
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
aug 16, 2025, 2:25 am • 0 0 • view
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.
aug 16, 2025, 2:27 am • 0 0 • view