> It's absolutely possible to be rational and yet wrong. It's also entirely possible to promote or allow something for a while and then decide it has finished serving its purpose.

Yeah. Also, generalizations can be true but misleading in a particular instance. I think a lot of people make that mistake with China, assuming because in general democracies have been more successful than autocracies [1], they can be complacent because China will fail. There's no reason autocracy with a talented leader (or one who's lucky) can outperform a democracy.

[1] People also often say that free markets are "more successful" than less free markets, and it's probably true to an extent, but there's also a lot of problems/disagreement defining what "success is." For instance, the US has traded away a lot of its general manufacturing capacity leading to more "success" by some financial metrics but failure by many others.