Sarah Paine

They're really good at staying in power.

For a while there under Deng Xiaoping, it ran in parallel what the economic reforms needed to be to produce wealth and what the party needed in order to be more powerful.

But now that's running at cross purposes because for the party to maintain its monopoly, well, all these much more educated Chinese aren't going to be interested in that anymore.

And so it's time to lock

those people up and then you're going to have trouble with keeping your economic growth rate going.

I don't know, but I think iconic leaders like Mao and Stalin, they were canonized by winning their wars.

Stalin, by winning World War II, the Russians revered him for doing that.

And they had experienced, every Russian experienced World War II.

It was central to their lives to win that thing.

So Stalin is canonized for doing that.

And Mao, the man who puts Humpty Dumpty back together again when no one else could, and then fights the great powers, capitalist powers to a stalemate in Korea, he's again been canonized.

Whoever comes after them is not going to have that level of prestige.

It's just going to devolve.

That's period.

And then for the successors of Stalin, they were sick of being terrified about whether they're going to be purged.

He kept putting bullets in people's heads, like Vladimir Putin, a

That you do this long enough that people are horrified and don't want to have it.

They don't want to live that way anymore.

So there's that piece of it as well.

So my estimation in that kind of system is there's going to be a leadership struggle.