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I just looked through my sheaf of saved papers to evaluate this and interestingly enough there are further examples of symbioses occurring without the initial mitochondrial endosymbiosis (albeit not well publicised ones) - for example mealybugs possess specialised cells containing endosymbiotic β-proteobacteria which themselves contain endosymbiotic γ-proteobacteria, essentially forming a set of nested obligate endosymbionts. The authors note this probably occurred multiple times, with different precursors of the ancestral γ-proteobacteria independently infecting the ancestral β-proteobacteria on approximately four occasions.
There's also the fact that it's hard to gauge how likely endosymbiosis would have been on early Earth; mitochondrial development likely hindered the development of further endosymbiosis along those lines to some degree because the already established eukaryotic lineage filled available niches.
I’ve seen this posited as well - that the primary endosymbiosis that formed eukaryotes, where a free-living bacterial cell got incorporated into a host cell to create mitochondria, expanding the cellular energy budget, is an extremely rare event that might limit the prevalence of advanced life throughout the galaxy.
That hypothesis falls apart a lot though when you consider that this has actually occurred multiple times; e.g. chloroplasts are also the result of endosymbiosis and in fact they have developed independently in Archaeplastida and Paulinella alike, which certainly speaks against the idea of it being a rare occurrence. And then there are the nitrogen fixing organelles in certain types of marine alga, which appear to have been a result of this same process. For primary endosymbiosis to have happened at least four times indicates the mechanism itself is not rare, and significantly weakens its ability to explain the Fermi paradox.
Every time I’d read their use of the term in Chinese Communist literature, it’s always got this background connotation with their earlier philosophical systems, owing more to the fact that even when Communism was developing and taking root in China, it was growing out of context of other traditions that history never shakes off entirely from the population.
To be quite honest I think China at this point is just straight up not "communist" and is not trying to be, frankly that ideology is not compatible with a country that quashes unions and Marxist agitators the same way they do any other potentially destabilising dissident, and produces new billionaires at a rate exceeding anywhere else in the world. Aspects that one might point to like e.g. state direction/ownership of some business are aspects of boilerplate authoritarianism, and these policies were also pursued in decidedly non-communist states like Mussolini's Italy (albeit it did so indirectly via state-owned holding companies). It always seems to me like people focus too much on the "communist" label stuck onto them and ignore the way the country is actually being run, which is something very meaningfully indigenous; what actually developed is not communism but a form of technocratic cyberpunk Legalism that deeply values political meritocracy (they even maintain the civil examination system for officials), iron-fisted rule-by-law, practical results-driven legitimacy, etc, and merely features some trappings of the discursive framework of Marxism to articulate their goals. If anything, out of all the countries in the East Asian region, China probably possesses the format of governance that's most true to the premodern Asian norm.
I always find it quite funny when people say things like "I love Chynese culture, but hate the government and CCP" or treat China as if its beautiful traditional culture has been wholesale supplanted by a very bad, no good system of statist authoritarianism when a cursory look at Chinese culture would tell you that the Party-state is in many ways a very close modern analogue to old Chinese ideas of legitimate governance and in fact the CCP is very nice in comparison to that. Most people appear to place too much importance on labels, have a view of culture as a set of aesthetics and vibes for outsider consumption instead of an entire framework of legitimacy, philosophy of governance, etc, and contextualise countries selectively depending on whether they are a friend or an enemy geopolitically, which leads to frankly psychotic discourse.
Yeah I always roll my eyes a little bit at "Chyna is going to collapse from demographic crisis". There is also the fact that China is only about 60% urbanised at the moment, and still has considerable ability to offset productivity losses from the ageing of its population via further urbanisation of their populace; urban productivity is far higher than rural productivity. It's not a permanent solution for an ongoing demographic trend, but it certainly does give them a lot more time to kick the ball down the road and implement viable solutions like growing its automation base (alongside other things), which means the Chinese have much more of a fighting chance compared to other countries. IMO the problem is far more exacerbated for countries like Japan and SK, both 90%+ urbanised countries where it's not as easy to offset the productivity losses from aging via urbanisation and scalable mass automation.
There's this weird tendency for a lot of "sinologists" and China Watchers to compulsively bet against China and predict imminent collapse, which has not gone well ever since... frankly, pretty much ever since Liberation in 1949. One would have thought that the ignominious failure of all the previous bearish predictions would have caused people to think twice before overconfidently proclaiming Chinese collapse in 30 days, but they appear to psychologically contextualise this as a replay of the Cold War which makes them believe they just need to wait for the falsities and contradictions of the Dragon Empire to be exposed, upon which time the whole edifice will cave in on itself. Very Francis Fukuyama of them.
To add to this, the fact that the US still has a higher birth rate than death rate is being largely driven by the immigrants they have brought in, who as mentioned are themselves are not necessarily net boons and who may well create drag on the system. The aggregate figure obscures a shit ton of heterogeneity - non-Hispanic white American deaths exceed births, and this has been true ever since 2012. If not for the mass importing of poorly-integrated low-skill foreigners who breed like rabbits I suspect the US' demographic situation would look more similar to what is currently going on in East Asia.
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