Just for FYI: China always has been a merchant state. Means it pays zero attention to democracy or human rights as far as merchants make money. While CCP is called communist, it lost long ago any communist ideas (public ownership of means of production, land for collective farms, state prices, equal incomes). All that is gone. The only remaining thing is that long ago, CCP fought GoMinDan (another nationalist party) and won and in order to get support, transformed into a communist party and by 1978 that experiment was over either. The current result is just a political regime which forgot about its communist roots and generally sunk into corruption of unheard proportions, yet actually developing economy (a classic merchant state). You can criticize it as much as you want but if merchants are happy, they will stick to what works (CCP).