While I agree that your central thesis on China must do what preserves the ruling status is quote is correct I think it's more clearly stated as China must do what satisfies its people and preserves the stability and increases the prosperity of the country. Besides such as Central thesis is representative of all successful and currently existing governing systems they're all trying to sell the same problems and trying to preserve the current ruling status quo. Since otherwise they would not exist. The devil is in the details and how each different governing system attempts to implement solutions to those problems.

I think the reminder of your point contradicts itself and contradicts the reality of China. But it's a common misconception and understandable given the common language often used to talk about china.

In reality, China is incredibly adaptive and is constantly evolving its governing system and the way it handles crises. In fact its flexibility is more than the Democratic systems which are incredibly stable and while apparently free seem hampered by special interests, excessive checks and balances and the cathartic and insubstantial emotive functions of elections and voting, which impedes a focus on and a delivery of substantial long-term results.

By contrast the Chinese system is basically the definition of adaptability and change. The centralized control, high public trust, recent memory of traumatic convulsive popular civil war and mandate, motivates and enables them to run experiments that democracy simply cannot do, as well as I think frankly terrifies them that if they don't keep the Chinese population satisfied they will rise up like they did 70 years ago and there'll be more bloody revolution. I think this legitimate fear of the Chinese leadership is part of what keeps them in line. But I also believe they genuinely want to deliver for their people and for China and one of the reasons is because they have a powerful unifying national narrative and I believe they genuinely buy into that. And I think that unifying narrative is a very useful thing as long as it's crafted constructively and positively as the Chinese one seems mostly to be. In contrast to the West's zootopia of divisions and fractured Zeitgeist discourse it seems a beacon of how people can be proud of who they are and I feel sad about the Western chaos but at the same time I think it's also a good thing for the West to go through that self-critical stage as long as it's it usually channel towards substantive issues and not taken to excess in duration or magnitude.

In the same way that science doesn't always produce results the governance and policy experiments of China are not always successful. But they're expensive ability to experiment and the large scale at which they can operate allows them to learn very quickly because they have access to a large amount of data and an ability to control for various conditions. This coupled with the general technocratic genius of the Chinese leadership class (and many of them are trained engineers for example), basically results in a sort of governing system that's constantly trying to optimize and solve problems but in the field of satisfying people maximizing stability security and economic output. Of course all of what I'm saying could simply be naive optimistic propaganda parroting the fantastical delusions of a utopian a deal which could not possibly exist in the corrupt real world. But I don't believe it is and from my experience China really does walk the walk as well as talk the talk. And if you look at the last 70 years they've been incredibly successful with the implementation of their 5-year plans they've been able to LeapFrog the rest of the world in development and achieve a scale of transformation that seems entirely unprecedented. These externally verifiable facts are undeniable.

I think it's hubris for Westerners to hope to remake China in their own image. Are westerners really sure that their own governing systems' image is really the right solution? It's so perfect and above reproach that no alternatives no improvements need be considered? Or the old refrain of being the least bad of all possible alternatives is still satisfying? My question is if they didn't try the other possibilities then how do they really know? On the other hand, If the West somehow managed to succeed in that zealoted quest I think it would be a great missed opportunity for the world, a missed opportunity to see and evaluate the development of an alternative governing system. On the other hand yet again, if the West was really so powerful and confident in their own system and they really felt the Chinese one was so flawed why would they care? Why wouldn't they just let the Chinese make their mistakes? If the Chinese system is really so broken as the Western propaganda would have you believe and if the West really cares about great power competition as it constantly says then surely the most effective strategy is to do nothing and let the Chinese score their own goals and the West can sit back from their iMax chairs watching the China system crumble. So I think it's more of a fear that the West has that maybe they're going to be bested at their own game: a global successful powerhouse of a country with a stable governing system; and maybe they're scared that in that future people will not listen to them so much. Or maybe it's none of that, maybe it's just another emotive insubstantial issue with which to rouse the populations of their democracies in order to secure votes to gain and preserve the status quo to implement the next rounds of provisions favorable to special interests, with a few insubstantial emotive concessions thrown to the public gallery, to sate public's current issue-of-the-day obsessions to keep the people happy.

While it can certainly appear to the outside or unwitting observer that a centralized authoritarian system like China is extremely inflexible and unresponsive to the people's demands, in fact through the elaboration and proliferation of the party bureaucracy down to the village level basically they're able to implement some sort of democratic consultative process where the concerns of local people are incorporated into and Central to the party's operation. So I'd say it is a highly effective, promising experiment in governance that's optimistic for the future of humanity because they're trying something different and so far they're succeeding remarkably well. I don't think their system is perfect by any means and certainly they have many things to improve (but it's not really my place to tell them that in many ways since they know their system best) but you have to consider that they've already improved much, and some of what they've learned they've learned through studying the successes and failures of Western systems just as they studied the successes and failures of Western technology and industry in order to replicate and then innovate on those foundations.

There's lots of examples of an issue being important to local people and the local government initially taking the wrong tack with that and then having to quickly backpedal apologize and reverse course in the face of public outrage and anger. I think if you look at the whole of China this is something that's happening all the time somewhere.

Although given all this it's undeniable that the apparent sensitivity to dissenting information and focus on authoritarian control does give the impression of fragility. That may not be only an impression. The system May indeed be fragile. But fragility does not necessarily mean negativity. In fact fragility can be something positive. If you consider that the Western system May in some ways be broken but it is incredibly stable then stability in the face of something which is broken is actually a negative. Whereas fragility is something which can invite evolution and allow for change. But a nascent system, like a nAscent idea, or a startup, May indeed be something which is fragile and needs to be protected. and perhaps a lot of the authoritative and control measures and the sensitivity towards disturbances can be seen as efforts to protect something which is fragile.

I think it's funny that a lot of criticism from the Western Democratic camp towards China occurs now at the point where China is in a way vastly different to the west. Whereas I think a more warranted amount of criticism ought to be directed in the possible future where China becomes a lot more stable and becomes in that stability a lot more like the West in its resistance to adapt progress and change.

So I think it's that old trope of people are scared and do not understand what's different to what they're familiar with that contributes a lot to the Western public's current enthusiastic reception of all things critical of china.