There are a number of different narratives about China in the press and there's a strong liberal paradigm that says authoritarian regimes will eventually fall and we just have to wait long enough because they can't be sustainable.

There's actually a whole strand of China political science studies called authoritarian resilience, which I'm always really skeptical

of because it seeks to explain how come the Chinese Communist Party has lasted as long as it has

and tries to come up with all these complex explanations for it. But the underlying assumption of the

entire discipline, that strand of the

discipline is, well, the Communist Party should have fallen by now. How come it hasn't?

Yeah. This is something weird and anomalous that we therefore have to account for.

Yeah, absolutely. But so many authoritarian regimes, I mean, if you understand the Chinese

regime as capitalist and you defied the world not into authoritarian versus liberal democracies and liberal democracies have popular support and authoritarian regimes don't.

And instead you just see both China and other regimes like the US and everywhere else as capitalist and having

different kinds of governments that may be more or less democratic or based on different

kinds of representation. As long as you keep your sort of, I mean, there is a sort of, I'm

oversimplifying hugely here, but as long as you keep your

capitalist system functioning and you keep your capitalist classes who wield a large amount of the

power and you keep your metal classes on side and your consumers happy, to a large extent,

I mean, it's not surprising that the regime that the Communist Party is able to keep

going. And that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. It's only if you divide the world up into

this slightly artificial liberal democracies versus authoritarian states that I think you come up with

strange paradigms that don't really work. That's my view anyway. If you'd like to hear the rest of this episode of PTO Extra,

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