THEY WILL GET OLD BEFORE THEY GET RICH.

Thomas Friedman has expressed envy for China's totalitarian state being able to circumvent process and Do Big Things quickly.  He also noted, some years previously, that they were likely to get old (meaning pension burdens and inexperienced workers) before they got rich.

May you live in interesting times.

What legitimacy the Communist Party possessed was based on the decades of economic growth inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. But growth has slowed to its lowest level in decades as the Chinese workforce ages, low-hanging investment opportunities disappear, and the trade war with the United States reduces manufacturing output and sends supply lines to Vietnam and Mexico. Capital is fleeing China at a record pace as the bourgeoisie hedge against stagnation and turmoil.

For all of the Chinese government's much publicized investments in research and development and defense, and despite the size of its economy, per capita gross domestic product is $10,000, slightly less than that of the Russia Federation ($11,000) and a fraction of that of the United States ($65,000). Recent weeks have brought an uptick in bank runs.

Meanwhile, the repression of socially dangerous elements (still relatively easy to contain as in Hong Kong and Macao, or to marginalize as ethnic minorities) tightens.

These are not the moves of a regime confident in its ability to win the allegiance of a multi-ethnic population of 1.4 billion people. They are the policies of an insular and jittery faction whose uncertainty toward a changing economic and demographic landscape has made it suspicious of and opposed to even the slightest hints of liberal democracy. The ambitions of Chairman Xi for a Eurasia integrated under the Belt and Road Initiative, where the preponderance of the latest equipment in key sectors is manufactured, are both grand and mismatched for a nation whose leaders are concerned most with the operation of the surveillance state that keeps them in power.

Meanwhile, the Great Power dynamics of the southwestern Pacific region look familiar.

The resistance to Beijing is both domestic and foreign. Lost in all the predictions of Chinese dominance were the voices of China's neighbors in the Pacific. Neither Japan, nor Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, nor Australia want to live in a Chinese lake. Most extraordinary has been the response of the United States. Within four years, the American elite has swapped its belief in China's "peaceful rise" for the recognition that it may be in the opening phase of a Second Cold War whose outcome will determine the ideological character of the 21st century. While Tariff Man wages his trade war, opposing Chinese theft of intellectual property and arguing for structural changes to China's state owned enterprises, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper speak of the political and security challenges presented by Chinese authoritarians who become more willing to lash out as they lose their grip.

It can't be reassuring to the elites, or to people who remember the 1930s, that the people who might have ridden up during the economic expansion have a lot to lose.

In the space of two generations China's professional classes went from nothing to a great deal of something. Publicly they attribute their success to talent and hard work. Privately they admit that they must share this credit with good luck.[4] But will the good luck hold? In a China dramatically dividing, a world cleft ever more clearly between haves and have-nots, will they be able to stay on the side of the haves? The problem is made all the more nerve-racking when they realize that this is not just their problem: it is their kid's problem too.

It is hard to ride the tiger; harder still to ride it while teaching your child how to hold the reins. This paranoia about the capabilities and prospects of the next generation casts an omnipresent gloom. It grips the hearts of parents from the lowest tier of the Chinese middle class all the way up to the families of billionaires. I know this through personal experience. I was disturbed by the first Chinese multi-millionaire who expressed this fear to me. "Why should he worry?" I wondered. Why should someone with all of this wealth be so stressed and worried about his children's intellectual training? Why does he worry about them not having an education good enough for "the challenges of the future?" Surely, given the wealth they will inherit, they will be ok?

Surely so.... unless you are not so sure your children will be in a position to inherit anything.

I wonder how you say "rigged system" and "drain the swamp" in Mandarin.

The Party is a racket. The guys at the top are not any different from the ones you deal with at the bottom. The Party exists to make sure their kids have a spot at the front of the line no matter how much more your kids deserve it. You are not forced to call Xi all these fancy titles because it will help him restore China to its ancestral glory: you are forced to do all of that so Xi Jinping's daughter gets into Harvard and his family racks up homes in Hong Kong. All of the taxes, the censorship, the ridiculous rules and regulations, the blustering about war, the hero-worship and the propaganda, the detention centers and the cameras—it is all a racket. You live a slave so that someone else's children can get ahead.

Or whether those homes of the nachalstvo in Hong Kong become latter-day versions of a Tulieries palace to storm.  "Sooner or later it will explode."

The footnote [4]: "I have never heard, in private or public, a Chinese person attribute their personal wealth to the Communist Party of China. Support for the Party stems from other sources."