To be honest, I am quite pessimistic. It is hard to predict what will come after Xi. Xi's problems are all well-known, so I am not going to repeat them here, but he somehow managed to prevent the ship from sinking. The judgement day for China as a whole could arrive on the day he retires or passes away in office. He has concentrated so much power in his own hands that his sudden disappearance could lead to lots of uncertainty. That's when you see groups like Shanghai-based financial fat cats (often sons and daughters of well-connected party elites), "liberal" intellectuals, journalists, radical feminists, and other so-called "liberals" within the CCP ganging up against the Xi establishment currently comprised of the military industrial complex, scientists, telecommunication giants, other national security organs, etc. There will likely be a country-wide power struggle and very chaotic street-level violence like Hong Kong in 2019, as both sides (or multiple sides) try to stir-up protesters on their behalf. And of course, you will surely have foreign interventions in the forms of back money and intelligence operations. Even fools would know that the financial fat cats in China would collude with foreign intelligence services and MNCs to limit the power of the CCP to point where those fat cats could continue to exploit the cheap labour in China whilst not paying their tax. God know what would happen when it all ends.
On the side note, something extremely sick is going on with people's values in China nowadays:
1. Middle class Chinese are now spending massive amount of money to try to cross into the U.S. via Mexico, risking everything despite absolutely no guarantee of being able to find a job in the U.S.
2. 996 work culture persists despite labor law clearly making it illegal. With the 996 work culture, employees are burnt out and have no family time at all. In other words, both employers and employees are violating the labor laws just to squeeze the last bits of pennies in cut-throat competitions. Current labour laws are literally impossible to implement since EVERYONE is violating them.
3. Toxic competition and back stabbings in both academic and professional settings called 内卷.
4. Urban young Chinese women (mostly daughters of well-to-do elites) refuse to marry and have babies with Chinese men. When they marry foreign men, they demand no bride price, but when approach by their Chinese counterparts, they demand exorbitant bride price in the name of "feminism". This social phenomenon (call it gender war, if you like) is arguably impossible to fix.
5. While the government hopes to resuscitate the collapsing birth rate, there are little mechanism in place to support pregnant women, and single mothers and fathers. Of course this can relatively easy to fix by increasing welfare coverage.
6. All of these problems, along with others, are making people extremely social darwinian in their beliefs. If you lose your job or your company get driven out of business, nobody would sympathize with you since it is "natural selection" of the fittest.
7. The richest people all try to transfer their assets abroad with the hope to tax avoidance. If you think American companies and Wall Street are kings of tax avoidance, you need to travel to Shanghai and actually talk to Shanghai business elites.
All of them are China's persistent vulnerabilities. Should China undergo democratic transitions, these issues could easily derail the transition and turn the country upside down.
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