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China had not seen proper peace for a generation, and it finally seemed to have it. And then to see here an ignorant comment calling a people weary from too many revolutions obedient sheeple, saying that they should have mounted a revolution and this "survival of the best warrior" bullcrap. In case you weren't listening, the instability of revolutions tend to attract tyrannic elements, as their history had shown them.
> worse case by foreign invaders that can only be better than current leaders anyway
If a revolution were to have happened, who's to say that China would still be better off? China had seen many foreign powers covet it and had freshly suffered at their hands; it is not improbable that a revolution then would mean a China divided and subjugated by unsympathetic foreign powers and abused, as the Japanese had done before.
If famines persisted, it was seen as as the doing of the emperor and that they were unworthy and thus could be replaced by anyone who had military strength, the Han dynasty founder was essentially a middle-class policeman.
Moreover emperors have long been got rid of by the Chinese Revolution of 1911, if people are sheeple, why would they violently depose their emperor?
You seem to also have forgotten the Tiananmen protests and subsequent massacre, which were against the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine.
With all Jiang Zemin's flaws, his best move was to "politically castrate" the party, and distance intra-party affairs from state governance. This is what made the two decades of progress possible: civil servants without little red books instead of brains.
In the current CCPs internal lingo, there is a term "Marxist ghosts" that was around since Jiang first took reign. The party has been long purging Marxist hardliners, but so far, have not came to full realisation why they have to do so other than "because they screwed up"
And I may disagree with your worst case scenario: see post-WW1 Europe.