The notion that all we need is a few months of inflation and unemployment and the people of China will be in the streets throwing out Xi and/or the CCP is, in my view, fanciful.

Even if Xi’s CCP is vulnerable - and I think it is - the vulnerability is more akin to the Russian Czar before World War I. That took several years of hardship and evident incompetence for people to finally say “enough”. Nor was it inevitable.

If China has an economic or financial crisis due to pressure from the US, I suspect initial anger could be successfully channeled outwards, via nationalism. Only in time might people begin to shift blame onto their own rulers.

There are several reasons why a revolution would, in my view, be slow in coming (as it was in Czarist Russia). First, there is widespread social discontent but no organized political opposition.

Partly this is due to the CCP’s extreme vigilance post-1989 to squelching any organized political protests. But there is also no clear vision of what an alternative would look like, and widespread doubt that it would truly be better.

The CCP works actively to sow that doubt (pointing to post-Soviet Russia and to the chaos following the Arab Spring). But it also taps into a long-standing popular Chinese fear of “luan” or chaos. People in Mainland China have not developed confidence in self-government.

In many ways, I think the CCP has as much or more to fear from growing affluence as from a national crisis in which they could portray China as a victim and the CCP as its defender in adversity.

I say this as someone with no love of the CCP. Quite the opposite, I see the hammer and sickle as a symbol comparable to the swastika, and had to choke down revulsion every day I lived in China and saw it on display.

But I also don’t tell myself pretty stories (“we’ll be greeted by crowds throwing flowers”) that are informed more by my desires than by the facts on the ground.

The situation in Hong Kong, by the way, is informed by some specific cultural, historical, and political dynamics that do not simply translate to the rest of China.