This article is from Democracy Digest:

Xi is convinced that his survival strategy will reinvigorate a decaying post-totalitarian regime, but it will almost certainly exacerbate existing tensions, create new challenges, and undermine the CCP’s prospects of long-term survival, Pei said, delivering the seventeenth annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World (above) presented by the Embassy of Canada and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Projections suggest that by 2035, China will have a per capita income equal to that of Chile today and some 300 million college-education citizens, producing a society with considerable capacity to effect democratic change “if it wants to”, Pei argued.

The Chinese Communist Party, since the time of Mao Zedong, has relied on three main pillars in order to maintain its iron grip on China and Xi has used these three Ps – control of personnel, propaganda, and the People’s Liberation Army to consolidate his power, says a dissident from the ruling elite. Cai Xia, a Professor at the the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School from 1998 to 2012, reluctantly concluded that Xi would not lead a struggle for political reform.

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