> I upvoted you for a thought-provoking perspective, but I think you're wrong historically. Most totalitarian governments fail on the battlefield, or they fail when the charismatic leader dies and his heirs are not so charismatic. Think of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the empires that fell during WW1, the Axis powers in WW2, Libya post-Gaddafi, or Saddam Hussein. Totalitarianism seems to be an effective way to rapidly modernize a population to take advantage of already-discovered technological advances, and then to mobilize the population for war. It fails heavily at actually waging war, where the life-or-death competition between powers leads to a rapidly shifting reality that totalitarian governments cannot keep up with, because totalitarianism requires a near-total distortion of reality in order to keep the ruling clique in power. Additionally, liberal democracies often have a deeper bench of talent and technological developments waiting in the wings; totalitarianism requires the extermination of these institutions as potential threats to the regime, but liberal democracy cultivates these institutions in times of peace and then can draw on them in times of war. Witness how quickly the allies deployed radar, sonar, codebreaking, convoy systems, fire control computers, mass production, strategic bombing, and nuclear weapons during WW2: almost all of these inventions existed within Nazi Germany (some of them were discovered there), but their widespread development was blocked by Hitler's disfavor or inattention, and so they never got the resources they needed.
Most of modern China's advances came in times of freewheeling Jiang-Hu era, and Xi mostly coasts on inertia. Domestic electronics manufacturing has been on retreat for the last decade, being supplanted by government pushed initiatives. Billions are being bamboozled on "O2O," "AI," "5G," "Big Data" by people who don't have even a remotest idea of what those are besides nice CG animations.
Industrial parks that made local makes famous during Shanzhai era are being bulldozed year after year to be replaced by campuses of firms brandishing current tech fashion trend buzzword. This severely impacts the output of local original products. Things like cheap LED lighting, battery banks, vapes, selfie sticks, hoverboards, quadcopters, stick computers, damn fidget spinners, portable audio amplifier, loads of bluetooth gizmos, tons of cellphone accessories, and so on — all that stuff was originally a product of Chinese garage industry. I can not imagine anything like this coming in such amounts in current cultural and business climate.