Earlier quoted context omitted.
China, behind the surface, is very anarchic, bejing can make rules all it wants but the local government beyond surface placation won't honor the spirit and restart production of all kind of stuff. Which is fascinating, cause as soon as party rule is threatened, that very same principle ceases to apply.
Any sufficiently big country is very anarchic in that sense. US and India are made of literal states. Russia resembles a medieval feudal structure. UK is England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and it all would be about 5% population of China. An idea that someone or something could govern such a huge amount of people directly and controlling all aspects of life and economy looks absurd to me.
The reason most large countries have standardized on democracy + separation of powers + rule of law (in various flavors) is precisely because it's a decent solution to this.
China's governance struggles are because it wants two contradictory things (a) absolute authority of the CCP + (b) absolute adherence to the rule of law.
Unfortunately, explicitly placing a political party made of humans above the rule of law is a recipe for ignoring the latter. First when it's politically inconvenient. Then, once it's become culturally acceptable, whenever anyone thinks they can get away with it.
Xi smartly pushed this back a few decades, to the extent possible, by identifying and pursuing corruption vigorously (from the top) as an existential threat to the CCP. Unfortunately, absolute power... etc. ... and inevitably aspects of those corruption crusades turned into removing political enemies from power.
Authoritarian regimes' greatest weaknesses are corruption and blindness to inconvenient truths.
Democracies' are lack of unity and long term planning.