On the relationship between economic growth and democracy in general, I'm with Daniel Treisman's observation https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-p

On the relationship between economic growth and democracy in general, I'm with Daniel Treisman's observation https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050718-043546 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-polisci-05... that more developed countries are more likely to democratize when the government changes than less developed ones, which often simply end up with another autocrat. But if the government is stable, autocracies can maintain economic growth for a long time, the current outlier being Singapore with 3 prime ministers in over 60 years and a more developed economy than most democracies. On Chinese ability to innovate, Jeffrey Ding points out https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2023.2173633 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2023.2... that China's innovation capacity is high relative to other countries, but the diffusion capacity necessary for widespread adoption of innovations is low. So theories focusing on the supposed inability of autocracies to innovate might be barking up the wrong tree. Even assuming that Xi actually makes all decisions attributed to him, that those decisions are stupid, and that they take economic decision-making from private business, he's still not omnipotent and the vast majority of economic decisions are made at a local level, in response to the particular conditions individual businesses are facing.