&gt;	History has proven time and again that authoritarian systems don’t work, and haven’t work for most of human history. If it was the case that an authoritarian, state-controlled system was superior, shouldn’t the Qing dynasty, or the Mughal empire, or the Roman empire be far more successful then we are now?

The Chinese dynasties were authoritarian on paper. In reality, they were many limitations that made it difficult to practice it.

Many people familiar with Chinese sayings would know about this saying - “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away”.

The sheer distances involved meant that distant provinces enjoyed quite a fair bit of autonomy. Why do you think the mother tongues of the Southern Chinese were so different from the Mandarin languages up north? Why are Southern Chinese people and culture somewhat distinct from the north?

Furthermore, the bureaucracy of imperial China is overstretched. A single official has to manage tens of thousands of people and he has the dual role of administrating the land and administer justice. They have to rely on whatever revenues they could raise locally, and in the later dynasties, this meant a woefully small team had to take charge of tens of thousands of people.

Making things worse, later dynasties tend to assign officials to provinces other than the one the official was from. A lot of Singaporean Chinese could not understand the languages of the grandparents, can you imagine how authoritarian some northerner could be in a southern province?

Factionalism was a big deal too in imperial China.  How authoritarian could most emperors be?

And by authoritarianism you meant being vested to approve everything in the whole of China, try imagining yourself dealing with all the shit? All the petitions, essays, reports, and what’s not. Ruling China required delegating and sharing power.

Even the famous queue hairstyle of the Manchu dynasty wasn’t imposed overnight by some authoritarian decree alone. It took a decade after the Manchu conquest. In some areas, they had to bribe the people. In others, the Manchus killed everyone refusing to comply. There were rebellions all over the place. The queue was the only aspect of the Manchu culture that the Qing manage to impose, everything else was voluntary.

Anyway, the Qing collapsed from many issues. Them being “authoritarian” wasn’t a major one. The Opium Wars, the Unequal Treaties, the Taiping Rebellion (by a guy claiming to be a brother of Jesus), the failed Hundred Days’ Reform by the Guangxu Emperor, and many more reasons led to the Qing’s collapse.