Do you understand how the Chinese political system works? I'd recommend that you learn a bit more about it from the Chinese perspective because Western generalizations of it miss a lot of details.

I'd recommend that you start from the bottom (how people can join the party and take office, how rural collectives work, how protests influence local policy) and make your way up to the municipal, provincial, and national level.

You'll see how each level has checks and balances to make sure that they make good decisions, and you'll see how the incentive structure rewards "good" decisions. You'll also see where a lot of the corruption comes from (in rural collectives) and why efforts to fix that haven't worked as well as they could.