Another factor is that China has considerable resentment of the "west", particularly the UK. The UK fought two (Opium) wars against China and won them. The consequences for China were dire. Conversely, the US massively supported China in its war with Japan. All of this is ancient history for the US and the UK, but not for China.
Japan is the boogeyman and likely will be at least officially for the foreseeable future (there's a long running joke that the only time one can riot in Beijing is when China inevitably loses to Japan in soccer, and that riot can only happen outside of the Japanese embassy). There's sufficient real life trauma inflicted upon my grandparents' generation - my paternal grandmother's entire family was killed for no apparent reason and only her and her sister survived, aged 12, and walked for 2 days to the nearest city and ended up in an orphanage, and the same happened to most but not all of my paternal grandfather's family, but by sheer luck since they were grain shippers on the grand canal and weren't home when the Japanese marched through my ancestral village on their way to Nanking, and you know what happened in Nanking. As a result I have almost no relatives on my father's side, in a village that's literally named after them. Their trauma I understand. But the CCP actively use Japan's atrocities for its own political means as well. Well into the 90s there was a yearly mandatory viewing of several anti-Japanese films, shot in black and white, that literally also taught the viewer how to make landmines and conduct guerilla warfare, in elementary school.
There are provocateurs the government pays to talk trash about various western nations, but it's not hard to see the underlying rationale - distraction - and it's also not hard to refute their claims with passages directly from Chinese text books and the official party line. Next to Japan, Russia had been viewed with the greatest suspicion until very recently, so recent that when the invasion started the government trolls weren't prepared to definitively defend Russia's actions (which allowed me to get the first word on Twitter about solidarity with Ukraine and cite the official party line on Russia's historical atrocities committed against China, which weren't refuted because, well, they happen to be true and well-documented by third party observers, like the British delegation that witnesses the ethnic cleansing of the 64 villages east of the Amur entirely by happenstance. Compared to those two, at least in my lifetime anti-British sentiment is almost nonexistent (the hundred years of shame is a grievance, but the CCP also needs to justify its existence beyond the British leaving, so the Qing dynasty's weakness was first and foremost to blame. How much anti-American sentiment exists wholly depends on how the government wants to focus on the Taiping Rebellion (religious, murderous, but also anti-Qing, and its expansion was checked definitively by forces under Frederick Townsend Ward, of Salem, Mass, outside of Shanghai, at a time when the Qing military was in full retreat. Ward is likely the first westerner to actively recruit and lead an army in China fighting for China against rebels) But for the less historically inclined, I'll just put it this way: to this day, Chinese families with means universally try to send their kids to be educated in the US or UK or Canada and really nowhere else, and there are more than one housing developments that are built in the Tudor style and advertised as British village communities. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then...
China didn't liberalize because the dominant ideology of the "west" is insanity. Who would want to joins that? In the "west", sex is supposedly a spectrum and 2 + 2 is "white racism". Why would China move in that direction? When China was controlled by Maoists, China was a catastrophic failure. Mao and his crazy ideas are long gone. Now the "west" is dominated by crazy ideas. Times change.
China's view on sex is a mix that is both oddly conservative in specific ways and far more liberal in other ways. Since western churches had little influence on any of the governments or most of the population, the main issue regarding sexuality and gender involves the obligation to procreate, something that the one-child policy was unable to suppress entirely but instead created a huge imbalance in the gender of mostly rural but also some urban births. There's no specific taboo on transgenderism beyond that - in fact the culture actively celebrates, in Beijing opera for example, males who play female roles with expertise and nuance. Although coming from a completely different place compared to drag/ballroom culture, the manifestation is not only broadly similar to the post-Paris-Is-Burning era of drag but in a way even more inclusive, since it was never underground as drag/ball was, and have always also included straight, cisgendered men, so a true meritocratic culture that presents as drag but without the stigma. Mei Lanfang, for example, was and still is considered one the greatest artists of the 20th Century in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mei_Lanfang Of course, since 'homosexuality' in prescriptive terms really dates to, well, no earlier than Kraft-Ebbing in the 1860s and in its current form the 1950s and the Mattachine Society and its offshoots, and descriptive gendering has a different connotation in a society that has a long history of eunuchs gaining great power, it's less the substance of the debate but the fact that a debate needs to exist at all on such a narrow point that is crazy, but really few people are thinking of what the west thinks. Subcultures in China have their own histories, traditions, shibboleths, memes, ways of determining in groups and out groups, etc. If they overlap with western constructions, then so be it, but it's not really a big deal if it does or doesn't.
As for Mao, officially the ruling party is still grounded in Maoism. The cult of personality is long gone, but the justification is that Mao sets the ground to apply Marx and Lenin to a pre-industrial society, and all that came after - Deng, and now Xi - are continuations of stages of socialism. With Chinese characteristics. There's no official repudiation of Mao, this isn't Soviet Russia and there's no de-Stalinization, at least not explicitly in any sense. You may think it's crazy. I may think it's crazy. But people in China generally don't.
I read with considerable interest the "Three-Body Problem" by Liu Cixin. There is general agreement (most assuredly including me) that this is the greatest science fiction of the 21st century (so far). Liu Cixin is apparently a strong advocate of the current Chinese government and the his works have not been censored (the same can not be said for Jung Chang).
I mention him, because he goes to great pains to describe the Cultural Revolution (CR) as utterly evil. In his books, a young woman decides to exterminate all human life in protest of the CR. Her decision is portrayed in a highly sympathetic manner. By contrast, Mao gets a total of 4 mentions in his books. The references to Mao are minor and quite neutral.
Americans tend to see a contradiction between the demonic characterizations of the CR and the ongoing cult of Mao. Apparently, Chinese people in China do not. Perhaps this is an example of how "western" thinking is different than "eastern" thinking? Perhaps not.
I tend to think that the differences in policy from Mao to Deng are much greater than any changes in the FSU from Stalin to Khrushchev. That said, I would agree that no leader of China has ever made a speech denouncing Mao.
However, the real point of my original note was that the west has gone crazy. How many people in China think sex is a spectrum? How many people in China think 2 + 2 is an expression of a repressive ideology?
Let me offer a different comment on "why China didn't liberalize". The CCP found a way to achieve massive economic development without eliminating the CCP's power. The Communist party of the USSR never did. The success or the former and failure of the latter is the bottom line.
The Chinese situation is explained as like the kid that watches Bruce Lee films and goes out into the yard to practice his moves, and eventually perfects the moves and then claims he is a master in martial arts.
Everything China is today is because is looted and leeched it from the US and other western industrial countries. We gave it all of the industrial secrets and IP. We educated its engineers and scientists... we even educated its leaders. It had this crutch where the US had none. We even saved the Chinese from being dominated by Japan.
China is built off the backs of previous generations of US inventors and producers. Without China the US would be a much better country. Without the US, China would be still a 3rd world country.
But China has done well in its looting plan... sucking the US to a husk of what it had been by serving the greed of American traitors who would mortgage their own family with an offer of more power, prestige and wealth.
The question is... can the fake Bruce Lee actually win the fight... has he learned enough to stand on his own... or is his mistaken in that the US has been and always will be his required crutch?
Counterpoint: China DID in fact liberalize, but in a manner that the CCP absolutely would not openly admit and invisible or incomprehensible to state-level outside observers in the west, in a manner that is ad hoc and infrapolitical. It's also unrealistic to use "democratic institutions" as the only benchmark for liberalization because markers like "individual freedom" and "extent to which the state actively interferes in the daily lives of citizens in a detrimental manner" are also evidence of liberalization, and personally I consider those to be grassroots and much better indicators, but difficult to quantify easily and almost impossible to study from afar or as a non-ethnic-Chinese (overseas Chinese have much greater access to Chinese society thanks to the ethno-nationalist stance of the CCP as opposed to someone not ethnically Chinese but otherwise have the same education/views/language skills). Democracy is ONE marker, but not THE marker for liberalization.
For example, there tends to be a gulf between the official CCP line that the west dutifully reports and how policies and decisions are implemented on the ground. "Anti-corruption" efforts are political purges (with Chinese characteristics, lmao) more often than not. The lack of an actual criminal justice system with due process and any semblance of fairness means that people are keenly aware that most grievances will not be resolved via official channels. The existence of guanxi as an accepted part of business even though even by Chinese standards it frequently not just resemble but IS nepotism or corruption as long as it's not flouted is one indicator of this parallel system by which power is exercised on the ground level. With the central government being an unreliable source of truth, information is disseminated and trusted on much more localized lines and since the CCP have been unable to even get its top leaders to speak Mandarin with clarity that could be universally understood - although my generation (late-Millenial) tend to at least speak Mandarin intelligibly albeit almost always with regionalisms variations in official settings. My grandfather, who recently passed away at the age of 92, reached high office within the CCP without ever being fluent in Mandarin. Written Chinese and spoken Chinese have historically always been separate, and it was no different under the CCP. But this also meant that informal, decentralized systems that provided aid, information, access to institutions, etc persist and acts as the real conduit of power on a local level. This is not unique to China, although it lacks a succinct equivalent in English. The concept of Landsmanschaft(n) for Jewish communities is comparable in the overseas context, although in China itself such affinity groups are far less explicitly organized (and offers few ways of joining, by design and tradition). But in spite of official centralization, even CCP leadership tends to operate in regional cliquish settings. A great deal of the overt centralization of power is performative, but performative doesn't equal fake necessarily. It is however fairly different from how power is presented, used, and devolved/federalized in the west. This is further complicated by the fact that the CCP does certain things for the benefit of western reportage that have no bearing on what actually happens on a policy level in the country, while other things happen on a widespread scale that the western media and academia has very little understanding of.
With that as the background, coupled by the fact that western (church) morality isn't something ingrained in the culture and attempts to partially integrate aspects of it into formal policy have generally failed when the population at large don't find any benefit from it, means that there are many aspects of Chinese society that is de jure conservative and constraining but de facto liberal. For example, money laundering is officially a huge problem, but understand that a) the Yuan's value is more or less plucked out of thin air to begin with and b) money laundering in China is far more focused on circumventing currency flows in and out of the country than dodging taxes, adds up to the phenomenon of rampant real estate speculation as a way to park one's wealth in something that is, if not entirely inviolable, at least real compared to the value of the Yuan. Cryptocurrencies now serve that function. It's incredibly frustrating to have regulators in the west treat crypto as some sort of giant ponzi or fad when it is the most real thing anyone in China can own, which it absolutely is. The GFW is incredibly porous, but political subjects are not what interests most people with internet access. Instead, the GFW and its countermeasures (aka 'scientific internet usage') concerns things that are officially banned but as the ban is arbitrary and there's considerable demand, whole cottage industries spring up to support the offshore hosting and organization and other services that facilitate... the distribution of pornography, which is officially banned in China but also ubiquitous. There is domestic porn but it's small scale and not really organized, but there are literally communities of millions of members (at least by signup count, who knows how many members are active) and an essential guerilla campaign to pirate porn into China - pirate because there's no legal channel by which it can be purchased - and the guerillas are winning, handily. Surely that is one form of liberalization, even though it's against official policy. But surely practice trumps policy when it comes any practice when assessing its prevalence, no?
Now, these are marginal gains from a western perspective, surely, but they're not marginal from the Chinese viewpoint, and the CCP and citizenry cares about western anxieties and benchmarks as much as westerners care about how much the Chinese citizenry think about them, which is generally 'not much at all'. Also, the CCP flexes openly against the west in opportunistic ways largely for the west's sake, when it knows it can exercise leverage it doesn't really have. The whole NBA tour hubbub was a calculated gamble that could have backfired if the NBA had a realistic assessment of its leverage in China. The CCP could not afford to anger every NBA fan in the country, there are more of them than CCP members, but leadership correctly sensed that the NBA did not have that assessed correctly and thanks to a culture of piracy, its impact on access for fans domestically was relatively low. Its suppression of the rights of Hong Kongers also was strategically timed because western xenophobia helps China out a lot - the brain drain of western-educated Chinese along with their financial resources would have been disastrous and it's a fear that is literally as old as Jim Crow - and the Chinese Exclusion Act. But while an administration that wasn't full of proud ethno-nationalists (ironically, China's own official policy) might have taken advantage of the leverage that was there for the taking - especially since doing so would have not even required any international wrangling but done entirely on domestic policy grounds, which China would have little room to argue with since sovereignty is a two way street, it correctly assessed the level of xenophobia within the administration and was able to pull off the occupation when other administration of either party would have likely intervened in some manner. But all this was predicated on knowledge of how the administrations in the west would react, which in itself required a much greater degree of understanding of the pernicious aspects of American politics, something it had access to because while F-1 student visas were given out liberally, H1-B quotas essentially counteracted any benefits beyond the immediate financial gains for institutions by kicking out a great portion of graduates, something that is clearly illogical and self-defeating. Like it or not, these are also effects of liberalization, but one can hardly blame America's tendency to shoot itself in the foot on China.
And ultimately much of this is like the whole "who lost China" narrative post 1949. Nobody lost China, China wasn't America's to lose. Trade liberalization has more than enough benefits on its own, and liberalization on a practical level certainly have been happening. So much of the anxieties from the west comes from a sort of projection, a bipartisan one at that, that somehow there is a prescriptive political liberalization scheme attached to economic liberalization, but western wishcasting is not something China is concerned about unless it thinks it benefits the regime. So, Gramscian hegemonic theory, which was formulated in an Italian jail cell by someone who have never visited the areas the theory is meant to apply to nor spoke any of the local languages and can be refuted by the field work and records of, well, an entire academic field, basically (Subaltern studies), is happily taken upon by the CCP because grievance politics is the basis of its raison d'etre. Democratic institutions? Since Mao had already redefined "democracy" in a manner that suits how the party wishes to rule but keep the name, why bother?
I actually am inclined to more agree, than disagree. China did liberalize to a substantial extent. In 1970, a Chinese person didn't have that much 'private life'. Now? A lot, lot more. Indeed, if a Chinese person stays away from politics, it looks like they will face essentially no government interference. The converse is that China did not democratize to any significant extent, which is what the author meant.
I would argue that in some respects China liberalized too much. By this I mean the Chinese housing bubble. It is arguable that the Chinese housing bubble is the worst (largest) bubble in all human history. I am not a big fan of Xi. However, he is exactly right in saying 'houses are for living in, not speculation'. It looks like everyone (in China) doesn't agree.
When it comes to China in general, I recommend texts by liberal intellectual and historian Johan Norberg. He argues that several things went wrong also because the EU and the USA became more protectionist
Regarding democracy. China is one of the most centralised nations in the world, despite is land and population size. So some kind of democracy taking place in China could be a matter of time, simply because many people are experiencing problems at the local levels.
Another factor is that China has considerable resentment of the "west", particularly the UK. The UK fought two (Opium) wars against China and won them. The consequences for China were dire. Conversely, the US massively supported China in its war with Japan. All of this is ancient history for the US and the UK, but not for China.
Japan is the boogeyman and likely will be at least officially for the foreseeable future (there's a long running joke that the only time one can riot in Beijing is when China inevitably loses to Japan in soccer, and that riot can only happen outside of the Japanese embassy). There's sufficient real life trauma inflicted upon my grandparents' generation - my paternal grandmother's entire family was killed for no apparent reason and only her and her sister survived, aged 12, and walked for 2 days to the nearest city and ended up in an orphanage, and the same happened to most but not all of my paternal grandfather's family, but by sheer luck since they were grain shippers on the grand canal and weren't home when the Japanese marched through my ancestral village on their way to Nanking, and you know what happened in Nanking. As a result I have almost no relatives on my father's side, in a village that's literally named after them. Their trauma I understand. But the CCP actively use Japan's atrocities for its own political means as well. Well into the 90s there was a yearly mandatory viewing of several anti-Japanese films, shot in black and white, that literally also taught the viewer how to make landmines and conduct guerilla warfare, in elementary school.
There are provocateurs the government pays to talk trash about various western nations, but it's not hard to see the underlying rationale - distraction - and it's also not hard to refute their claims with passages directly from Chinese text books and the official party line. Next to Japan, Russia had been viewed with the greatest suspicion until very recently, so recent that when the invasion started the government trolls weren't prepared to definitively defend Russia's actions (which allowed me to get the first word on Twitter about solidarity with Ukraine and cite the official party line on Russia's historical atrocities committed against China, which weren't refuted because, well, they happen to be true and well-documented by third party observers, like the British delegation that witnesses the ethnic cleansing of the 64 villages east of the Amur entirely by happenstance. Compared to those two, at least in my lifetime anti-British sentiment is almost nonexistent (the hundred years of shame is a grievance, but the CCP also needs to justify its existence beyond the British leaving, so the Qing dynasty's weakness was first and foremost to blame. How much anti-American sentiment exists wholly depends on how the government wants to focus on the Taiping Rebellion (religious, murderous, but also anti-Qing, and its expansion was checked definitively by forces under Frederick Townsend Ward, of Salem, Mass, outside of Shanghai, at a time when the Qing military was in full retreat. Ward is likely the first westerner to actively recruit and lead an army in China fighting for China against rebels) But for the less historically inclined, I'll just put it this way: to this day, Chinese families with means universally try to send their kids to be educated in the US or UK or Canada and really nowhere else, and there are more than one housing developments that are built in the Tudor style and advertised as British village communities. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then...
China didn't liberalize because the dominant ideology of the "west" is insanity. Who would want to joins that? In the "west", sex is supposedly a spectrum and 2 + 2 is "white racism". Why would China move in that direction? When China was controlled by Maoists, China was a catastrophic failure. Mao and his crazy ideas are long gone. Now the "west" is dominated by crazy ideas. Times change.
China's view on sex is a mix that is both oddly conservative in specific ways and far more liberal in other ways. Since western churches had little influence on any of the governments or most of the population, the main issue regarding sexuality and gender involves the obligation to procreate, something that the one-child policy was unable to suppress entirely but instead created a huge imbalance in the gender of mostly rural but also some urban births. There's no specific taboo on transgenderism beyond that - in fact the culture actively celebrates, in Beijing opera for example, males who play female roles with expertise and nuance. Although coming from a completely different place compared to drag/ballroom culture, the manifestation is not only broadly similar to the post-Paris-Is-Burning era of drag but in a way even more inclusive, since it was never underground as drag/ball was, and have always also included straight, cisgendered men, so a true meritocratic culture that presents as drag but without the stigma. Mei Lanfang, for example, was and still is considered one the greatest artists of the 20th Century in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mei_Lanfang Of course, since 'homosexuality' in prescriptive terms really dates to, well, no earlier than Kraft-Ebbing in the 1860s and in its current form the 1950s and the Mattachine Society and its offshoots, and descriptive gendering has a different connotation in a society that has a long history of eunuchs gaining great power, it's less the substance of the debate but the fact that a debate needs to exist at all on such a narrow point that is crazy, but really few people are thinking of what the west thinks. Subcultures in China have their own histories, traditions, shibboleths, memes, ways of determining in groups and out groups, etc. If they overlap with western constructions, then so be it, but it's not really a big deal if it does or doesn't.
As for Mao, officially the ruling party is still grounded in Maoism. The cult of personality is long gone, but the justification is that Mao sets the ground to apply Marx and Lenin to a pre-industrial society, and all that came after - Deng, and now Xi - are continuations of stages of socialism. With Chinese characteristics. There's no official repudiation of Mao, this isn't Soviet Russia and there's no de-Stalinization, at least not explicitly in any sense. You may think it's crazy. I may think it's crazy. But people in China generally don't.
I read with considerable interest the "Three-Body Problem" by Liu Cixin. There is general agreement (most assuredly including me) that this is the greatest science fiction of the 21st century (so far). Liu Cixin is apparently a strong advocate of the current Chinese government and the his works have not been censored (the same can not be said for Jung Chang).
I mention him, because he goes to great pains to describe the Cultural Revolution (CR) as utterly evil. In his books, a young woman decides to exterminate all human life in protest of the CR. Her decision is portrayed in a highly sympathetic manner. By contrast, Mao gets a total of 4 mentions in his books. The references to Mao are minor and quite neutral.
Americans tend to see a contradiction between the demonic characterizations of the CR and the ongoing cult of Mao. Apparently, Chinese people in China do not. Perhaps this is an example of how "western" thinking is different than "eastern" thinking? Perhaps not.
I tend to think that the differences in policy from Mao to Deng are much greater than any changes in the FSU from Stalin to Khrushchev. That said, I would agree that no leader of China has ever made a speech denouncing Mao.
However, the real point of my original note was that the west has gone crazy. How many people in China think sex is a spectrum? How many people in China think 2 + 2 is an expression of a repressive ideology?
Let me offer a different comment on "why China didn't liberalize". The CCP found a way to achieve massive economic development without eliminating the CCP's power. The Communist party of the USSR never did. The success or the former and failure of the latter is the bottom line.
The Chinese situation is explained as like the kid that watches Bruce Lee films and goes out into the yard to practice his moves, and eventually perfects the moves and then claims he is a master in martial arts.
Everything China is today is because is looted and leeched it from the US and other western industrial countries. We gave it all of the industrial secrets and IP. We educated its engineers and scientists... we even educated its leaders. It had this crutch where the US had none. We even saved the Chinese from being dominated by Japan.
China is built off the backs of previous generations of US inventors and producers. Without China the US would be a much better country. Without the US, China would be still a 3rd world country.
But China has done well in its looting plan... sucking the US to a husk of what it had been by serving the greed of American traitors who would mortgage their own family with an offer of more power, prestige and wealth.
The question is... can the fake Bruce Lee actually win the fight... has he learned enough to stand on his own... or is his mistaken in that the US has been and always will be his required crutch?
Counterpoint: China DID in fact liberalize, but in a manner that the CCP absolutely would not openly admit and invisible or incomprehensible to state-level outside observers in the west, in a manner that is ad hoc and infrapolitical. It's also unrealistic to use "democratic institutions" as the only benchmark for liberalization because markers like "individual freedom" and "extent to which the state actively interferes in the daily lives of citizens in a detrimental manner" are also evidence of liberalization, and personally I consider those to be grassroots and much better indicators, but difficult to quantify easily and almost impossible to study from afar or as a non-ethnic-Chinese (overseas Chinese have much greater access to Chinese society thanks to the ethno-nationalist stance of the CCP as opposed to someone not ethnically Chinese but otherwise have the same education/views/language skills). Democracy is ONE marker, but not THE marker for liberalization.
For example, there tends to be a gulf between the official CCP line that the west dutifully reports and how policies and decisions are implemented on the ground. "Anti-corruption" efforts are political purges (with Chinese characteristics, lmao) more often than not. The lack of an actual criminal justice system with due process and any semblance of fairness means that people are keenly aware that most grievances will not be resolved via official channels. The existence of guanxi as an accepted part of business even though even by Chinese standards it frequently not just resemble but IS nepotism or corruption as long as it's not flouted is one indicator of this parallel system by which power is exercised on the ground level. With the central government being an unreliable source of truth, information is disseminated and trusted on much more localized lines and since the CCP have been unable to even get its top leaders to speak Mandarin with clarity that could be universally understood - although my generation (late-Millenial) tend to at least speak Mandarin intelligibly albeit almost always with regionalisms variations in official settings. My grandfather, who recently passed away at the age of 92, reached high office within the CCP without ever being fluent in Mandarin. Written Chinese and spoken Chinese have historically always been separate, and it was no different under the CCP. But this also meant that informal, decentralized systems that provided aid, information, access to institutions, etc persist and acts as the real conduit of power on a local level. This is not unique to China, although it lacks a succinct equivalent in English. The concept of Landsmanschaft(n) for Jewish communities is comparable in the overseas context, although in China itself such affinity groups are far less explicitly organized (and offers few ways of joining, by design and tradition). But in spite of official centralization, even CCP leadership tends to operate in regional cliquish settings. A great deal of the overt centralization of power is performative, but performative doesn't equal fake necessarily. It is however fairly different from how power is presented, used, and devolved/federalized in the west. This is further complicated by the fact that the CCP does certain things for the benefit of western reportage that have no bearing on what actually happens on a policy level in the country, while other things happen on a widespread scale that the western media and academia has very little understanding of.
With that as the background, coupled by the fact that western (church) morality isn't something ingrained in the culture and attempts to partially integrate aspects of it into formal policy have generally failed when the population at large don't find any benefit from it, means that there are many aspects of Chinese society that is de jure conservative and constraining but de facto liberal. For example, money laundering is officially a huge problem, but understand that a) the Yuan's value is more or less plucked out of thin air to begin with and b) money laundering in China is far more focused on circumventing currency flows in and out of the country than dodging taxes, adds up to the phenomenon of rampant real estate speculation as a way to park one's wealth in something that is, if not entirely inviolable, at least real compared to the value of the Yuan. Cryptocurrencies now serve that function. It's incredibly frustrating to have regulators in the west treat crypto as some sort of giant ponzi or fad when it is the most real thing anyone in China can own, which it absolutely is. The GFW is incredibly porous, but political subjects are not what interests most people with internet access. Instead, the GFW and its countermeasures (aka 'scientific internet usage') concerns things that are officially banned but as the ban is arbitrary and there's considerable demand, whole cottage industries spring up to support the offshore hosting and organization and other services that facilitate... the distribution of pornography, which is officially banned in China but also ubiquitous. There is domestic porn but it's small scale and not really organized, but there are literally communities of millions of members (at least by signup count, who knows how many members are active) and an essential guerilla campaign to pirate porn into China - pirate because there's no legal channel by which it can be purchased - and the guerillas are winning, handily. Surely that is one form of liberalization, even though it's against official policy. But surely practice trumps policy when it comes any practice when assessing its prevalence, no?
Now, these are marginal gains from a western perspective, surely, but they're not marginal from the Chinese viewpoint, and the CCP and citizenry cares about western anxieties and benchmarks as much as westerners care about how much the Chinese citizenry think about them, which is generally 'not much at all'. Also, the CCP flexes openly against the west in opportunistic ways largely for the west's sake, when it knows it can exercise leverage it doesn't really have. The whole NBA tour hubbub was a calculated gamble that could have backfired if the NBA had a realistic assessment of its leverage in China. The CCP could not afford to anger every NBA fan in the country, there are more of them than CCP members, but leadership correctly sensed that the NBA did not have that assessed correctly and thanks to a culture of piracy, its impact on access for fans domestically was relatively low. Its suppression of the rights of Hong Kongers also was strategically timed because western xenophobia helps China out a lot - the brain drain of western-educated Chinese along with their financial resources would have been disastrous and it's a fear that is literally as old as Jim Crow - and the Chinese Exclusion Act. But while an administration that wasn't full of proud ethno-nationalists (ironically, China's own official policy) might have taken advantage of the leverage that was there for the taking - especially since doing so would have not even required any international wrangling but done entirely on domestic policy grounds, which China would have little room to argue with since sovereignty is a two way street, it correctly assessed the level of xenophobia within the administration and was able to pull off the occupation when other administration of either party would have likely intervened in some manner. But all this was predicated on knowledge of how the administrations in the west would react, which in itself required a much greater degree of understanding of the pernicious aspects of American politics, something it had access to because while F-1 student visas were given out liberally, H1-B quotas essentially counteracted any benefits beyond the immediate financial gains for institutions by kicking out a great portion of graduates, something that is clearly illogical and self-defeating. Like it or not, these are also effects of liberalization, but one can hardly blame America's tendency to shoot itself in the foot on China.
And ultimately much of this is like the whole "who lost China" narrative post 1949. Nobody lost China, China wasn't America's to lose. Trade liberalization has more than enough benefits on its own, and liberalization on a practical level certainly have been happening. So much of the anxieties from the west comes from a sort of projection, a bipartisan one at that, that somehow there is a prescriptive political liberalization scheme attached to economic liberalization, but western wishcasting is not something China is concerned about unless it thinks it benefits the regime. So, Gramscian hegemonic theory, which was formulated in an Italian jail cell by someone who have never visited the areas the theory is meant to apply to nor spoke any of the local languages and can be refuted by the field work and records of, well, an entire academic field, basically (Subaltern studies), is happily taken upon by the CCP because grievance politics is the basis of its raison d'etre. Democratic institutions? Since Mao had already redefined "democracy" in a manner that suits how the party wishes to rule but keep the name, why bother?
I actually am inclined to more agree, than disagree. China did liberalize to a substantial extent. In 1970, a Chinese person didn't have that much 'private life'. Now? A lot, lot more. Indeed, if a Chinese person stays away from politics, it looks like they will face essentially no government interference. The converse is that China did not democratize to any significant extent, which is what the author meant.
I would argue that in some respects China liberalized too much. By this I mean the Chinese housing bubble. It is arguable that the Chinese housing bubble is the worst (largest) bubble in all human history. I am not a big fan of Xi. However, he is exactly right in saying 'houses are for living in, not speculation'. It looks like everyone (in China) doesn't agree.
When it comes to China in general, I recommend texts by liberal intellectual and historian Johan Norberg. He argues that several things went wrong also because the EU and the USA became more protectionist
Democracy in the USA should not be "preserved". Instead, it should be developed, renewed, regenerated and revitalised as via liquid democracy https://medium.com/@memetic007/liquid-democracy-9cf7a4cb7f
Regarding democracy. China is one of the most centralised nations in the world, despite is land and population size. So some kind of democracy taking place in China could be a matter of time, simply because many people are experiencing problems at the local levels.
But which "American values"? Not even many Americans have such values, just take Donald Trump as an example.