China's demographics are a problem, yeah. I'll give you that all day. Yes, they have a dependent economy, sure, but if you think about it, so does the US - nobody builds physical goods in the US, and American corporations are just as import-needy as China is export-needy. Food security is just a famine away, and The Party wouldn't lose any support even if a few million people died.

The Chinese people have ZERO problems overall with a dictatorship. You can't manage to take a billion people out of poverty without one, sadly. The Chinese that I've worked with not only like what the Party has done to their families and communities, but also their local economies.

Your view is that it's a brutal dictatorship. Their view is that The Party has put a roof over their heads, put food in their stomachs, developed an economy, modernized their country, educated them (and paid for them to study overseas), and has given them a good life - a much better one than their grandparents ever got a chance at.