“No one can stop the wheel of history,” said the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, on the 75th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s proclamation of the creation of the People’s Republic of China. And the wheel is indeed still turning — but that may not be good news for the fourth-generation heirs of that revolution.

The 1950s was the time of peak communism, when people still feared or hoped that it would spread across the whole world. That was never likely, however, and, it never spread any farther beyond Cuba and Vietnam. The Soviet Union itself finally evaporated peacefully in 1991 at the age of 74, taking the rest of the European communist regimes down with it.

At that point, China suddenly became the world’s oldest surviving communist State — which had the same psychological impact on the CCP as losing one’s parents does to those from the middle generation. Suddenly your own generation is on the front line, with personal extinction waiting for you down the road. The Chinese communist revolution was still only 42 years old in 1991, of course, but a chill wind began to blow as CCP members realised that communist regimes can be mortal too. From that time on, avoiding the fate of the Soviet Union has become the unwritten subtext of almost every major policy decision the CCP regime has made.

Inevitably, there were competing prescriptions for the best way to avoid that fate. By the middle 1990s, two dominant strategies had emerged, espoused by two rival factions: the ‘princelings’, who were the children and the grandchildren of the founding revolutionary heroes, and the ‘populists’, who had risen by merit. Most ‘populists’ had grown up poor somewhere in the country’s vast interior and were aware of the needs of vulnerable social groups like farmers and migrant workers. Their formula for outlasting the Soviet Union was a more generous welfare State, more open media, and more democracy within the party. The ‘princelings’, by contrast, were born to privilege and rose easily through the ranks of the ruling party as they matured. They generally took a more authoritarian and centralising approach to politics, and they regularly pointed out that it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to ‘reform’ the Soviet Communist Party that precipitated its downfall.

However, in the nineties and the noughties, the Chinese economy was still growing very fast, and a choice between the rival strategies could be postponed. But then the economic miracle ran out of steam.

There was nothing miraculous about China’s thirty years of high-speed growth (10% a year). Most industrialising economies get that one-time bonus growth while the rural population migrates to the cities and provides emerging industries with almost limitless cheap labour.

Britain had that in 1850-1880, the United States in 1870-1900, Russia in 1920-1940 (cut short by the Second World War), and Japan in 1950-1980. It never lasts, and China’s time was up by 2015.

Since then, Beijing has been cooking the books to maintain the pretence of at least a 5% growth rate. The real growth rate is 2%-3% at best — and probably negative during the lockdown years. The glory days are past, and the question of how to avoid the Soviet Union’s fate must be faced squarely.

That’s why the truce between the princelings and the populists was broken in 2012-2015, as Xi, the ultimate princeling, took over all the major offices of State: president of the People’s Republic of China, general-secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and chairman of the Central Military Commission. It is decided: the future is authoritarian.

We can’t estimate the longevity of the kind of high-tech total surveillance State that Xi is building in China now, because it’s new thing in history. It’s more ambitious than any previous experiment in controlling human behaviour, and, if it works, then the regime could turn out to be immortal.

On the other hand, you just have to write that sentence down to realise how implausible it is. The ‘old hundred names’ have seen off a dozen other dynasties and countless invaders; they’re probably not finished yet.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth