China May Be Incompetently (In Addition to Evilly) Lead

 "A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point." - Astral Codex Ten

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-jinping-just-isnt-that