Your "naive faith" in the nature of the PLA as a non-imperial instrument seems contrary to a history of a thousand years of popular revolts against "Imperial rule" in many regions of what is now China.

Your assumptions about how seriously the "Gini coefficient" is taken in governing circles in China seems not only contradictory to the experiences of the people I know living there, but also the outcomes of government policies we can see in action.

Distrusting the Western press is a good thing, but you might consider being less certain about "the realities on the ground" if you are claiming a position of "generalised distrust of the propaganda we're being fed."