As I started to read what appears to be an excellent biography of Stalin, it occurred to me that there are clear analogies in Chinese history to the grim periods of the Soviet experience. For the Great Leap Forward, see the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture and the diversion of resources to industry in the 1920s and 1930s; for the Cultural Revolution, you have Stalin’s purges. In both countries, dictatorial excesses were followed by periods of oligarchical rule, which were subsequently replaced by another era of dynamic one-man rule (Gorbachev; Xi). Are there any lessons to be learned here?
The first thing you would note is that the analogies are not perfect; the Soviet period of crash collectivization and industrialization had monstrous results, but it at least created a country that was capable of resisting the Nazis in World War II, while the Great Leap Forward was just a disaster, with no mitigating impacts. On the other hand, Stalin’s purges were directed by a single psychopath operating within the chain of command, while the Cultural Revolution was an effort by Mao to use people on the street to overcome resistance within a leadership over which he had lost control. And nobody would say that Xi resembles Gorbachev in any way.
What you should take from this is that communist revolutions and rule create similar issues regarding leadership structures and economic growth, but that different countries answer the questions in different ways. Individual agency still matters, even in China. Xi was a choice, not an inevitability.