| | Can the author explain why the majority of dictatorships don't end well? It's assumed that China's success is magically tied to its non-democratic rule, but if anything in life has taught me it's that there's always another story to be told. In China, for the most part you're left to your devices. They use to give services like healthcare, education, and housing for free as per their constitution, but it was clear as their population grew such services couldn't be given in full so they whittled them down to nothing. This also includes the police, which is mostly for show and those who are too noisy or too stupid to keep their head down. So, if you're smart, polite, and creative you can get by in China in ways you can't here in the US. It has nothing to do with the dictatorial nature of the national government. If anything, it's despite the existence of their regime's irrationality that they prosper. For if the PRC decided tomorrow to dismantle even a fraction of their market reforms, it would spell the end of their reign. This is especially true in terms of land management, where people may not own the land they sit on, but they own the fruits of the labor they invest into it (especially farmers). So, you can see they didn't go along with market reforms out of some idealism, but rather out of the fact that it can keep their people fed. For if they're not fed, they have no reason to obey and many reasons to topple them.
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