One of the comments is that China is authoritarian not totalitarian which is half true at least. There's an extent to which it's totalitarian in that there are all those government-owned or PLA-owned businesses but I'm not sure how we should interpret them, maybe just as capitalist intrusions in the government. Others have described China as "McDonaldsism-Leninism" i.e. capitalism in an authoritarian state. Thirty years ago "totalitarian" might have been a fair description of China (Great Leap Forward, etc.) but now I think it isn't.
 
I don't think the failure of the Tiananmen protests made the fall of the Wall possible. If anything it made it harder: if they'd succeeded it would have helped.
 
I hope China will turn to democracy before it gets so powerful we get a new existential-threat-period of confrontation like 1890s-1945 or 1940s to 1991 or so. I don't see why it can't happen. It might be driven by internet-infected youth?
 
> While I share the admiration for those Chinese who protested in 1989, I'm of the opinion that
> it probably would have been a disaster if they had won.
 
I suspect it would have been an economic setback. Whenever the political revolution happens it will drag China down for a while. That's a price that's going to be paid some day, I'm sceptical there's any benefit to paying a continuous price in human rights, etc., in order to delay the economic price.
 
> I never saw a plan from them to deal with the vast rural poverty
 
There were influential members of the government who favoured moving toward democracy. Presumably coming up with policies like this would have been their responsibility, not that of the students and do-gooders protesting in Tiananmen. Would a democratic government have been less able at this than the Zhong Nan Hai?
 
> and doing what the Russians did would likely have led to similar outcomes.
 
Selling everything to gangsters was indeed unwise. That wasn't obligatory, it's just that the people in charge didn't try to stop it happening. And that's because the people in charge were Yeltsin and his friends, who were dishonest even when they were sober. I doubt I know enough about China to say what would have happened but my uninformed guess would be lots of corruption but less actual gangsterism.
 
> It may sound odd, but I simply cannot see an alternative to the Chinese Communist Party that
> actually has a plan that isn't just democratic sloganeering and repetition of western liberal
> platitudes. You can't just install democracy and sing Kumbaya.
 
I don't think government planning has to stop just because the country is a democracy. A successor state would inherit the PRC's apparatus. If it didn't for some reason then yes, China's screwed, but Tiananmen was at least partially a revolution from the top so I don't see that as likely.

 

Note this is not my work, so the CC license doesn't apply - but ask and David will probably be fine with reuse, as long as adapted arguments aren't represented as his.