There are generally two narratives in mainstream Media 1) Eric Li’s view that somehow CCP’s “meritocracy” bureaucrats selection is vastly superior than western democracy’s elected officials or 2) Everything about Chinese system sucks and it will blow up. Truth is always in the middle, and if faced to make between these two choices, many reasonable Chinese living in the west would pick 1) on some of the issues, as many non Chinese would probably too. The key is actually to focus on facts and pragmatic things, rather than two extremes