Interesting point. To expand on it... By analogy, western Europe has a long history of basically continual war, generally featuring some combination of France,

Interesting point. To expand on it... By analogy, western Europe has a long history of basically continual war, generally featuring some combination of France, Prussia, England, and Spain. No one analyzes Brexit as a return to literal western European warfare, at most as an analogy of interests. The last century featured advances in weaponry that changed the cost benefit of armed conflict in a way to make some types of historically prevalent warfare much more rare. You could argue that the difference with China is the fear that information control and the other authoritarian elements of the communist party are masking significant internal discontent, making the political situation more volatile than can be reliably observed. And... that civil wars aren't the type of warfare that technology has made more rare. (Really just limiting superpower territorial invasions of other superpowers?). But who knows. China is such an enormous complicated country that there are basically no parallel examples to help us predict its future... Even China's past is limited help. China of the Tang dynasty was more similar in population to present day Myanmar. Its problems and issues and politics might have basically no discernable relationship to China's real issues today.