> Basically Xi's nightmare is the disintegration of the Soviet Union and he's running the opposite playbook that Gorbachev used.
This is certainly what it looked like from Russia in the 90s, when China was just starting to meaningfully rise. I think Gorbachev's main mistake was that people were given political/personal freedoms before economic ones, and it was done way too quickly. After some 70 years without these freedoms, people did not know what to do with them, so a lot of bad shit happened in late 80s and "wild 90s". Economy was decimated, Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia itself was close to falling apart as well. Just read any US geopolitics text from late 90s or early 00s - they all prognosticate that Russia will be no more, salivating to divvy up the spoils. What got in the way of that was Putin, or, to be exact, Russia's national security establishment which installed Putin, since nobody knew who he was 6 months before he became president.
So the way the Chinese policy was perceived from Russia, it was something more sane. For one thing their stated timeframe for the transformation of the country (50 years IIRC, but I might be wrong), seemed more realistic. For another they started introducing capitalism first, rather than give a bunch of dirt poor people completely unrestricted political freedom a-la early 90's Russia, which could only lead to anarchy and disaster.
And I do believe they will succeed in the long term. The best analogy I have is the current obsession in US corporations with quarterly results, leading to suboptimal long term outcomes. This is what the US itself behaves like, except the "quarter" is 4 years long.
China doesn't have to worry about that, they live on a different time scale and can enact consistent policies spanning many decades. This is both a blessing and a curse. It's easier for the US to course-correct, which can be beneficial because most long term plans do not survive contact with reality. But if China gets the big picture right (which to me it seems like they do), and is able to course correct on the margins, they don't really need the randomness that the US system has.
I just wish they'd knocked it off with the concentration camps and child labor at this point. It undermines their own progress.
As to Ma, oligarchs with political aspirations need to be periodically reminded who runs the country. This is why Khodorkovsky ended up in prison for a decade. He got way too powerful, exerted a lot of ifluence in Duma, and thought taxes were optional. None of those three things were acceptable to the Kremlin.