> I'm not sure Deng Xiaoping would agree with this framing, though he was eventually able to shift things after Mao. There was a lot of violence during the cultural revolution. Deng reversed a lot of this, but it was in a revolutionary context (right after the cultural revolution).

Deng reforms came 12 years after cultural revolution. After the death of Mao. And his coming to power and his reforms were realized as internal party affair, without engaging Chinese population in any form of novel revolutionary activity. And the spirit of those reforms directly contradicted last revolution. To the point of admitting mistakes of this revolution and its leader.

> I agree that it doesn't necessarily vilify it (pragmatism is good), but if it's done only as an illusion/lie to maintain authoritarian control by one group then that is villainous.

Good and evil, heroes and villains. World really doesn't seem to work in this way. Creating two party system to solidify system of power and safeguard it against revolution is not an illusion. It's an action. If CCP right now split into two parties it would not be any more illusory two party system than the one in US. Sure it may vary in corruption levels or balance between local power centers and nationwide power but those are just parameters that would evolve to their optimum values. Optimum for the rulers of course.

> No, but the thing I'm taking issue with is the 'pragmatic solution' being a dead locked two party system that exists only for stability. That's the cynical view I think is wrong.

It's not a deadlock. It's carefully maintained to be exactly this. What do you think would happen if one party was winning all elections for decades? Would two party system survive?

Do you think people really neatly divide equally between the ones who want more progress and the ones that prefer things to stay as close as possible to the way they used to be? Democrats are winning popular votes for some time now and yet they are loosing elections occasionally. Gerrymandering is used to tip the balance back towards 50/50. Wouldn't you think that whenever democrats come to power it should be their utmost priority to deal with gerrymandering? So they can win every time? But they don't want to win every time, because stability of the system which is prerequisite of their wealth and power depends on them loosing from time to time. And gerrymandering is useful tool for ensuring that.

> I think the US is a democratic system with rule of law where policy moves forward via arguing.

It's true to some degree. The question remains how much of the policy moves forward via arguing and how much of it moves through mostly (publicly) silent agreement same way as it does in single party system. And also how fast the policy moves.

You noticed that two party system moves things slower than single party system because of the speed/stability trade off.
I'd argue that it also moves slower than the democracies with multiparty systems, that can allow themselves to loose a party or two completely if their reactions to changing environment were not sufficiently fast and adequate. Where parties have to join forces and compromise to rule.

Two party system can't loose a party. Can't even allow one party to fracture. Republicans had to accept Trump. Because if not, he'd fracture their voter base. Same way they still have to accept him because, he still could create his own party and steal significant portion of republican voters. And that would mean democrats winning all the time and we can't have that because that would ultimately lead to unrest.

Two party system is more stable (and stagnant) than both single party and multiparty system and I think China will pick it up as soon as it significantly overtakes US in economy and military. There's no point of doing it sooner because it would just slow them down. And there's no point in trying multi-party democracy because it's very risky even though, when it succeeds it combines decent speed with decent stability.

Until then China must be very careful about who their citizens hate and quench every spark.