The idea chinese culture is based on is how to control people and how an individual should rule a nation. Two schools of thought exist in this area, taoism and confusianism. The subject has been beaten to death and starting in 1911 a period of internal tension lasting up till 1949 lead to that the dictatorship was replaced with a one party system. The only differences being that power is distributed to a few more individuals. Communism is an evolution of dictatorship. Instead of one individual being better fit to lead the idea is that a group of people having the same philosophy are better fit to lead. This communist system broke down in 1966. Re-establishing itself in 1976, slowly adopting a capitalistic economical system.
A one party system is always doomed to disintegrate. China has adopted capitalism. Capitalism is to a one party system what heroin is to a drug addict. Capitalism is just artificial breathing to a system that is disintegrating. It just prolonges the natural process of disintegration. The crash will just be that much harder. People want power and people that have power want money and can get money by taking bribes. So the system becomes corrupt. People are going to kill each other to get into the right position where they can milk the system. If this is not enough, please have some poison. Integrating a democratic society is just like taking poison for a one party system. I'm thinking of Hong Kong and Macau. The Chinese don't seem to get enough of this since they are trying to get a reunification with Taiwan. There will be democracy in China. It's just a question of time. If one wants to help the Chinese on the road to democracy than one could give Taiwan one's full support in that they may negotiate the best possible deal with China for a reunification. The better deal the Taiwanese get the more poison is poored into the Chinese system. The reason it looks like China is going to disintegrate as a society is because of the long tradition of belief in the philosophical idea of how one person or party can lead a people. They haven't figured out that the practical solution to that problem is called democracy. Russia is still struggling with its legacy of the idea that some people are more fit to lead than others. However, Russia has open channels to western societies and there is a strong influence coming from the west. Putin gets to meat with people over and over again that treats him as an equal although their societies are much more succesful than the Russian. The immediate effect of treating people as equals is that they stop guarding their position. A consequence of this than becomes that they listen to what you got to say. This is another way of saying that when you treat people as equals a conversation turns from a peeing contest into an exchange of ideas and concerns. What I'm saying is that I believe Russia will learn from western societies and slowly become a democracy in the western sense.