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.
Any inner circle of political elites has some leverage over the individual leader, but Putin didn't stay in power for 22 years by failing to understand how to maintain delicate balance among these forces, play them off one another, and in general route all plots and intrigue around 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.
It's the distinction that autocrats are all whining, pathetic losers - they torture their political enemies because they feel justified doing so - but it doesn't make them less dangerous.
