Already on their way there.
Absolutely true. And their experts are far more educated and better funded than North Korea.
Social credit score has that function already, too low score = no passport for you.
It'll do more than that. Social malcontents won't be able to get job or might even lose their home if the transgression is severe enough. No home/job = no woman. And with the gender in-balance, the men are not going to risk it. Especially those who HAVE something to lose. That's a security option that can keep the middle and upper class firmly in Beijing's pocket.
See what happened with the Rome deal, China, unlike NK, has an extra option - money and corruption.
The problem with this option is that China is already massively corrupt. The Chinese are the most overleveraged state in the history of the world in both absolute and relative terms. They actually make the Greeks look monetarily responsible. That's how bad it is. Every major, key sector is supported by state loans that are basically unpayable. And this is the danger that Xi is facing.
China has been able to keep apace with the insane loans because they've been feeding off the hunger for cheap goods by the West. So long as they can keep open trade with America, they can manage the situation. It may not be pretty and it may result in lots of unrest, but they could manage it. There'd be enough money to put through the system to keep total collapse. The problem for China is just as they've become almost entirely reliant upon America for its security and economics, America is pulling back.
Once the US stops giving them trade, then China isn't getting the money and investments it needs to keep the machine running. And once that happens, the Chinese have to prioritize who gets the money. But they won't have enough money to cover even their critical sectors. And when one critical sector goes down, it will probably cause a cascade effect that hits all other sectors, which in turn means that those sectors, even with cash infusions, might still plummet, setting off yet more cascades. If any single critical sector catches a cold, the entire economy might just shit out its organs.
What's made the system work is one of materialism. Everyone agrees to follow Beijing, because Beijing has made them rich(er). Once that's no longer possible--indeed, once all that wealth not only stops flowing, but the existing wealth evaporates into thin air, then following Beijing is just NOT going to cut it. And because China has for the past few decades only focused on pushing materialism, there is no cultural, national depth for the Chinese to really fall back on.
That's why Xi is trying to force a nationalist reaction within his own country by picking fights with other countries. He needs to generate hatred of other countries within China to strengthen in-group relations. Because his government is so corrupt and at opposites with much of Chinese morality that without cash infusions to paper over it, no one is going to follow him anymore.
But naturally, being defectors, they have seen plenty enough regardless, so that element kinda isn't working. NK is making defections a small scale problems through the harder means, like DMZ, family sanctions, and China being absolute dicks to defectors on their side of the border. Even in worst case scenario, defectors are less of a threat than rebels.
There is a difference though. It's not about population size; that's not the issue, though it is an issue. The real problem is different national and ethnic identities. North Korea is a nation. It was split off from the rest of the Korean Nation, but all the North Koreans see themselves as one people. Because they are a nation. China is a civilization-state. They may all look at themselves as Chinese, as a German, Italian, or a French might consider themselves European and acknowledge a shared history there--but that does not mean that a German will take orders from a Frenchman or a Frenchman orders from an Italian.
North Korea can survive as meagerly as it does because they are one people; they're all in it together. All for one, and one for all. That is not the case with China. And attempting to do the same in China as in North Korea will cause ethnic-national cracks to split wide open. And that is what Xi is trying to avoid. At the same time he's needing to handle a coming oil crises, a coming external security crises, an economic crises, and a demographic crises.
It doesn't matter which gun goes off, because China is completely boxed in. And they know it.
Considering the alternative, they would do their best, which we have only a limited idea on how well will that work, as no one in history has tested such a technologically advanced totalitarian state's resilience to rebellion.
That's true. But many times in history, totalitarian states have sought to hold down rebellion and it tends to fail in one way or another. The question is, is China advanced enough that its state can hold itself together with nearly no allies, no economic trade bloc, insufficient cash, and disintegrating social cohesion?
They would rather not need to, they have other, more optimized ways, but if that's all they have, i think they will try.
The educate people are a problem, especially because there are so many of them. And that means that the elites can't give them the promise of a better, Western life. And they're smart enough to know that they're being cheated, even if they don't understand that any attempt to change the system will destroy China as it stands now. And when there's a lot of less educated malcontents looking for an answer...well, those more educated people will fill it in for them.
China is in a precarious situation. It has the strength and money now to make external changes, but it cannot do so against the full might of the Americans and their European allies. The Russians will not aid them, unless it is to advance their own agenda and so are unreliable allies. So China must at once work slowly to avoid an American reaction--because Americans tend to overreact to any threat, while at the same time working quickly enough to outrun the coming doom of economic downturn which could cause their entire system to collapse.
What the Chinese need is for Americans to start trading with them like they did between the 1990s and 2016. Where they mostly turned a blind eye to China's activities for the sake of cheap, easily obtained goods. And they need the Americans to do that long enough for Beijing to work through the demographic and economic crises.
But that would have been a hard sell to Clinton, who would have limited China's territorial ambitions and clipped trade relations. And instead they got Trump, who destroyed the American-Chinese trade relations almost as quickly as he could tweet it out. Add in the pandemic and the Chinese cannot go back to the 90s or 00s. China will crash; that is inevitable. What Xi and his party are doing are trying to mitigate the damage of when that finally happens. Xi hopes that most of China will remain part of China (optimally, all of it) and they can all be miserable for the next 40-60 years until they ride out the demographic and economic crises. Then, when the fit has passed, they might once again stand as one of the Superpowers of the world.
But that is probably NOT going to happen.