The Chinese Communist party exists without major disruption because it has promised its people a better living standard and frankly it has given it.
Close, but not exactly. What they have given the people is peace, order, and stability. They wouldn't care if they were dirt farming and shitting in ditches so long as they were doing so in an orderly fashion. No one bucked the Great Leap Forward despite being driven to literal cannibalism.
This is wrapped up in the chinese worldview/mindset. Which is why China cannot just launch a bunch of missiles into Taiwan and have guys in speedboats plant the Party flag on the rubble, because they are technically Chinese people and wholesale murder of Chinese people is a huge disruption and NOT peace order and stability. This is also a good portion of Chinese inaction on Iran or Venezuela - its better to just let that shit go down and make a deal after than look like a warmonger by intervening.
Their military is untested but i wouldn't discount it.
China repealed One Child (at a time) in 2010s. Around 2030 is when those children will start hitting military age and shit might get interesting.
There is a whole thing about people not overly trusting the government and children being viewed as your 401(k) that I'm not going to get filly into, but One Child (at a time) was done to try to make people subserviant to the goverment and also prevent their children from becoming anti-government radicals. If you not starving in old age depended on a single child or maybe two, you are not going to let that main older child go to pro-democracy activities which might have them stuck working McDonalds because o their bad social credit score.
"Their military is untested but i wouldn't discount it."
Is a key take away. Ukraine has shown that as long as you have a mass of people and give zero fucks about casualties, you can still be a threat regardless of how shit your equipment is.
This was shown in Korea and Sino-Vietnam, that Chinese are masters of the "more soldiers than you have bullets". Vietnam had an eye-watering KtD ratio against Mao, but if it wasn't for the Soviets pressing the issue and forcing Mao to the peace table, they would have still had their capital sacked.
Of course its much harder to send overwhelming human waves over a stretch of Ocean.
