If Only The Romans

[Anomalocaris]

I think the historic and repeated experience in China is many more people die when central power is successfully weakened. Individual political freedom gained at expense of central authority is transient, and inevitably degrades and disappears with the rise of fractionalism, regionalism, and eventually warlordism. The overall prosperity and security of China, as well as the maximum of economic freedom, is seen to be highly correlated with the ability of central power to muzzle or crush forces seeking to weaken central authority and prevention of fractionaism and warlordism. So By and large highly effective central authority is much more important to overall welfare of its people than specific details of the form of that central authority. This is why many Chinese thinks western preaching of the ills of their forms of central authority is a "sugar coated poison", because it seek to exaggerate the less important and the impermanent in order to deprive China, to its devastating harm, of the far more important.