How Revolution, Despotism & the rise of materialism present perplexity for President Xi

Because men are no longer tied to another by bonds of caste, class, guild, or family, they are only too apt to attend solely to their private interests, only too inclined to think exclusively of themselves and to withdraw into a narrow individualism that stifles all public virtue.  Despotism, far from combatting this tendency, makes it irresistible, for it deprives citizens of common passions, all mutual needs, all necessity to reach a common understanding, and all opportunity to act in concert.  It immures them, as it were, in private life.  They were already apt to hold one another at arm’s length.  Despotism isolated them.  Relations between them had grown chilly; despotism froze them.

In this type of society, where nothing is fixed, everyone is racked constantly by the fear of falling lower in the social scale and by the ardor to rise.  And since money, even as it has become the principal mark of class and distinction, has become unusually mobile, passing constantly from hand to hand, transforming the status of individuals, and raising or lowering families, virtually no one is exempt from the constant and desperate obligation to keep or acquire it.  The most common passion are therefore the desire to acquire wealth in any way possible, a predilection for business, the love of gain, and the lust for material comforts and pleasures.  These passions have spread readily to all classes, even those in which they were previously alien, and if nothing stops them they may soon enervate and degrade the entire nation.  But it is of the very essence of despotism to encourage and spread such debilitating passions, which help it achieve its ends.  They divert attention from public affairs, occupy the imagination of the people, and make them shudder at the very idea of revolution.  Despotism alone has the power to create the secrecy and the shadows in which greed can thrive and dishonest profits be amassed in defiance of dishonor.  Without despotism these selfish passions would be strong; with it they rule.[1]

Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (1856)

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[1] Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, ed. Jon Elster, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 5, 6.  See the Forward.