Agree the CCP has done irreparable damage and will be met with unkind eyes by future historians. However, unlike you guys, I'm not so sure whatever replaces it will be any better, despite recent hype about the Mandate of Heaven returning with a vengeance.
Writing up a future scenario that elaborates further, if you're interested. But if you ask me, the likelihood the CCP keeps clinging to power and unleashes Tianamen Square 2.0 to crush all opposition makes blowback — and therefore, a regime with even
more extreme tendencies — much more likely to arise than an autocratic, but austere and semi-honorable one that learns the right lessons. Think a Chinese version of Ayatollah Khomeini with the genocidal ambitions of Adolf Hitler coming to power and swearing revenge against "British drug merchants", "Euro-Bolshevik heathens", and "American corporations and consumerists" whose debasement of their mighty civilization proved that, if nothing else, leaving the rest of the world to its own devices was a grave mistake. If Communism was cancer that progressed to Stage 4, then Neo-Legalist rule is the hatchet-man that comes in to put them out of their misery straightaway — and probably axe a few more patients while he's at it, sad as I am to say.