>>593
The funny thing about Asian Communist dictatorships is that it's not substantially different from the despotism from time immemorial, and they can regress to that whenever they feel like it. It's mainly the labels on everything that have changed and a skepticism towards traditions (some of which were, in fact, backwards).

NK kept the mythic ancestry sort of woo-woo and the Xi era is flirting with state qigong.

(Mao weirdflexed about killing more scholars than Qin.)