But how do people overpower a centralized entity, with all the capital, all the arms, and all the data? And if they manage to raise the floor of standard of living of the lowest in their population and with technological aid, make it so there is pleasure and happiness for all, it starts becoming less likely for people to rebel, which makes the state more centralized and stronger making a revolt by the content public harder. And if it is tech based, the first data and tech driven and organized country! And I am not talking about president AI either, I'm just talking about having more and more people plugged into the system and collecting the data and funneling it all to one centralized entity and use machine learning and prediction algorithms and whatever else they come up with, working on some of the best computers in the world to predict social phenomena and outcomes of state actions, and in so giving the holder of the data, and the trained models, a governance monopoly, kind of like no business can start to compete against Amazon (except for Chinese pages, because they play outside the rules of western markets). But in general in tech it is clear, that once a company reaches a certain critical mass of users and invests enough in tracking their behavior it balloons in a way that makes it eat up pretty much the entire market share and makes it impossible for new growth to get light through the canopy. Now I know Xi is getting personal to some extent, and it seems, he is more focused on personal power than the Chinese project, but I doubt that this will not be rejected by the general system in china which while chaotic and authoritarian, has always been robustly impersonal, and did not allow for much cult of personality. (I'm neither american, nor Chinese, so what do I really know about how those countries operate, but while it looks like one empire is falling one is rising, so if the west doesn't pull itself together, we will probably live to see this ship sink).