There are good reasons to believe China's situation is in fact quite unique among totalitarian concepts and very difficult to replicate. China's situation represents a very complex, multi-generational cultural-political totalitarianism, and it required a unique context economically for it to occur. I've never seen another nation come even remotely close to replicating what it takes to set that up.

Take Turkey for example, under Erdoğan. Let's say he is, or wants to be, a traditional dictator. He's probably gone in 10 or 20 years due to age. His regime ends with him, very likely, because there's no broad cultural underpinning to his regime and legacy. That's the case in most totalitarian examples of the last century.

The cultural reformations that enabled the China boom, starting with Deng Xiaoping, are being systematically rolled backwards.

The economic gains from the late 1970s to ~2009, were very easy compared to the challenges that come next to continue pushing the per capita results ever higher. When you're starting from $175 GDP per capita in 1980, just about any meaningful improvement at all in the system will get you to $1,000 or $2,000 per capita.

My point being, only when the tide goes out do you see who is swimming naked, to borrow a line from Warren Buffett. China's vast growth no doubt masks immense problems that only become clearer in their scope and risk as their 30 year economic expansion matures (as it is now).

The people of China will tolerate a lot of things if you take them from $200 GDP per capita to $10,000. China is not going to be able to replicate that climb again, from here forward. That will have consequences, as the social contract in China requires perpetual, preferably rapid, improvement.

What China has done is extraordinarily expensive. They paid for it with a unique, historically singular export machine and trade surplus and starting from a context of a near zero welfare state (diverts capital from investment & growth) and from a setup with nearly maximum economic slack (easy to fill in for decades).

What other nations have anything like that setup to replicate from? Russia (fascist dictatorship, long totalitarian history) for example doesn't have that sort of extreme economic slack, its GDP per capita is already up where China is at today; the same goes for Turkey. The Russian system is mature, slow growth, with considerable existing structural financial demands that prevent the vast free use of capital as in China.

China's rules today are not the same as China's rules in 1996 or 2006. Culturally they've lost a lot of the modest freedom gains that were acquired over decades, in just the last five or six years. How does that impact the ability of their economic system to continue to scale over time, as the oppression ramps up?

These are two different systems - Deng vs Xi - not a continuing of the same system. Xi gets to ride on the accomplishments of the Deng revolution, including the financial capabilities it made possible. I think it's a fair question as to whether China can keep moving forward as they previously were, while simultaneously removing the Deng approach that made it all possible in the first place.