> This is the game and balance of power as it exists today Your model missing important thing - logistics. - Logistics is so much huge factor, that in reality

> This is the game and balance of power as it exists today Your model missing important thing - logistics. - Logistics is so much huge factor, that in reality, large totalitarian country usually become Neo-feudalism, meaning, typical local official is at so large distance from totalitarian center, that he could do with their subordinates near anything, effectively become local prince. - Lower effective in small countries (Singapore), in large lower become local. And China is LARGE country, even with modern technologies, it is divided to provinces, which have significantly different behaviors. So they will have in one province 2+2=5, in other could be 2+2=6, and in third 2+2=7, etc. Adding rules accepting wide specter of interpretations, make things more totalitarian. This is in fact payment of central government to local officials. I only can't at the moment figure out, for what they pay locals, but there not much variants - most probably they prepare to invade Taiwan. BTW, in democracy countries also provinces different, but they not trying to hide this information, so we know these sadly facts. And Chinese totalitarian power constantly spend huge resources to hide truth, and you believe for their lie.