Several of today’s remaining one-party authoritarian regimes have been in power 50 to 65 years, and there is good reason to think that they, too, are now facing the “70 year itch.” Part of the problem is that revolutionary one-party regimes like those in China, Vietnam, and Cuba cannot survive forever on the personal charisma of their founding leaders. Mao and Ho Chi Minh are long since gone, along with all the other leaders of the revolutionary founding generation, and in Cuba the Castro brothers are in their final years.

A more basic issue is that these regimes have a tough time achieving what Max Weber called the “routinization of charisma” because of a dilemma that confronts all modern dictatorships. They are damned if they perform and damned if they don’t. Once the revolutionary fervor of the founding period fades, the only means they have to establish their legitimacy is through successful performance—in essence, economic development. If they do not perform, then they may stagger on for some time with raw coercion and external assistance (liked that which North Korea gets from China, and Cuba from the Soviet Union and now Venezuela). But such external dependence leaves them highly vulnerable, and performance failure drives growing societal alienation and defection, as we are seeing now in North Korea and Cuba.

However, if, as in Vietnam and especially China today, authoritarian regimes do “deliver the goods” of development, they face—as the PRI did in Mexico—a different dilemma. It is impossible to create a middle-class society without eventually generating middle-class values and middle-class organizations. Poring over attitudinal surveys, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel showed in their 2005 book, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy, that “socioeconomic development tends to propel societies in a common direction … regardless of their cultural heritage.” With rising education and incomes and growing access to information, people become more tolerant of diversity, more demanding and assertive, and more willing to protest. Their value priorities shift from seeking material gain and security to seeking choice, self-expression, and “emancipation from authority.” Closely intertwined with this psychological shift is the rise of a civil society—of independent organizations and flows of information, opinion and ideas. These psychological and social changes undermine the legitimacy of authoritarian rule and generate favorable conditions for a political transition to democracy.

This is the historic social transformation that is now under way in China. It is fortunate for China and the world that the China is approaching the “70 year itch” after a period of authoritarian success rather than failure. More than three decades of breathtakingly rapid economic growth have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty and have created a society and economy much better able to implement democracy than would have been in the case if China had remained mired in North Korean-style poverty, stagnation, and totalitarianism. Moreover, as charitable, environmental, and other organizations gain autonomy from the party and state, as people spread critical opinions on blogosphere, and as protest movements organize against environmental degradation, corruption, and other abuses, the Chinese are gradually learning the arts and skills of citizenship.