Past 20-30 years as you said. Past performance is not a guarantee of future success. They don't have the same officials now as they did for the past few decades. Check out who the current ruler is and its background. This guy is a hardcore dictator who doesn't want to listen to any idea beside his own. And he's only got an elementary education. That's a recipe for failure.
> From 1975 to 1979, Xi studied chemical engineering at Beijing's Tsinghua University as a "Worker-Peasant-Soldier student". The engineering majors there spent about 15 percent of their time studying Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought and 5 percent of their time doing farm work and "learning from the People's Liberation Army".
So, university education in chemical engineering, with 20% political content. Still, not "only an elementary education".
It was a “recommendation” based system at the end of cultural revolution and Xi was mostly been assigned to study there without any qualifications. basically the university has stopped accepting students for 10 years at that time. The Chinese version of the wiki has detailed explanation of what “worker peasant solider” student was. Anyway I doubt he was able to learn anything given his education background.
