China is autocratic, but maybe not a dictatorship like Russia. I had the feeling that the CCP has some leverage over Xi, whereas Putin’s power is more concentrated on himself.
It's wishful thinking to imagine that a lone disgruntled civil servant with a gun is all it takes. If it were that easy, it would have happened a long time ago; autocrats, by their very nature, are always in peril, in that in any given moment there's no shortage of people who ahem, wish them ill.
That's what makes my skin crawl about assessments of other global autocrats in Western media as irrational. This childish way of looking at things makes them into some kind of cartoon villains; the "Mad Mullahs" who run Iran, "Crazy" Kim Jong-un...
These people may be distasteful, however, they are _anything_ but irrational. They are the most eminently rational and sophisticated calculators and political operators on the planet. They wouldn't last two seconds in power if they weren't.
Based on what? "Feelings" about dictators is how the world got into this mess in the first place.