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Philip Pan slightly disagrees with Minxin Pei's analysis that even though the party-state has successfully resisted change so far, pressure on the system for political liberalization is building.

Instead, Pan notes that it's important not to underestimate the ability of this remarkably resilient party-state to adapt and survive. It has been on the brink of collapse many times in its nearly 60-year history, and it has always found a way to make it through. It survived the violent upheavals and disasters of Mao's misrule. It survived the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. And most recently, perhaps, it managed to abandon its cover-up of the SARS epidemic just in time to contain the disease.