The change from communism to fascism didn't solve a lot of the problems in China.  There is no denying it is now incredibly wealthy but the social problems are still there with the addition of a new one, the same wealth imbalance that is plaguing the West.  Like the emerging dictatorship in the West the Chinese dictatorship has the major flaw of hubris.  It turns out that if you are never wrong you will never be right.

I moved from a large city to a small town two years ago.  I still get posts from the Nextdoor app from my old very urban neighborhood.  The majority are people begging for handouts or complaining about crime.  In the small town even though a lot of people have the app they don't post at all.  This small town is about as close to anarchy as a government can get and still function.  People more or less do what they want and it turns out what they want to do is working as well as being told what to do in the city.  In the city they are told to just accept homelessness and crime.  Both are almost unknown in this town of 10,000.  The same problems of drug abuse and poverty exist here but don't seem to have the same effect on people.  There is a kind of pride that comes with self reliance.  

As I have said many times, social engineers are steeped in determinism.  They only deny biological determinism because it gets in the way of the justification for their engineering.  What they seem incapable of understanding is abstract reality.  Because they are steeped in determinism, abstract reality cannot be real.  If they were not so good at confirmation bias and dealing with cognitive dissonance the contradiction would be obvious.  No freewill, no social engineers.  The hubris required to ignore this contradiction is staggering.  As Nietzsche  said “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”   The social engineers have made themselves gods or Übermensch and there has been plenty of blood starting with the French Revolution, then Marx, Hegel, the Nazis and the Communists as well as wars of financial empire started by the West.

At some level I suspect that nearly everyone in my small town believes in biological determinism because of the remaining connection to agriculture and animal husbandry.  Proof in a way that biological determinism is not at the heart of the problems with movements such as the early progressives, Nazis, Soviets,  or even the French revolutionaries.   What those movements have in common is small groups of intellectuals who made themselves Ubermensch.  By extension today the fascist corpocracy that has risen up even in the former Communist China and certainly in the West is an outgrowth of the same philosophical flaw.  Determinism magically divorced from biological determinism.  

The history of the enlightenment is interesting as it relates to this topic.  Because religion tried to resist science and the improvements to the quality of life for many people it brought it has slowly been pushed aside.  "Pure Reason" or as the French revolutionaries put in the "goddess of Reason" were supposed to replace it.  Humanism would be the new religion.  The problem is that science is entirely deterministic (if you are going to offer quantum physics as an argument against determinism you don't understand quantum physics).  The problem is that science itself is entirely abstract.  If you argue it is tied to experimentation the tools used are still only offering approximations of reality and the results have to be interpreted using abstract thinking tools such as mathematics.  Science is an approximation of reality, at times a very precise and accurate approximation but still an approximation.  In part because it is reductionistic and struggles with complex chaotic systems.  If you want to understand this better try Stefan Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".

The social sciences on which social engineering in the modern world are built are not particularly accurate or precise.  Still the social engineers act as if they have god-like insight.  They are blind to the complexity of society because they are reductionists in the spirit of traditional science.  They are trying to reduce the irreducible.  It works fairly well for biology because even though it works with complex chaotic systems those systems do not change rapidly, they are restrained by reproductive fidelity.   Societies are complex chaotic systems that change so rapidly that no one can keep up.  Yet the social engineers act as if they are as predictable as chemical reactions.  It turns out that the only way to reduce them to something a human can comprehend is history.

It is not so much that social engineering is a new thing every king and priest was a social engineer.  Often suffering from the same flaw as modern social engineers, determinism.  Divine rights and the will of God being examples.  What history tells us is great civilizations do not arise on the backs of slaves.  Great civilizations somewhat ironically arise out of freewill.  Out of a shared moral code.  In the East it is expressed as the mandate of heaven in the West as Rights.  The element of merit is introduced.  Merit is deeply tied to agency.  To have merit you have to have agency and to have agency you have to have freewill.

Arguments over the possibility of freewill generally ignore abstract reality. The way that abstractions such as money alter the meaning of time and space.  Freewill is another abstraction that alters the social contract.  It injects responsibility, merit, agency, meaning and morality into a physical world that is entirely amoral.  Top down systems appear to us as efficient but that is only because freewill makes cooperation possible.  It's as simple as understanding that punishment is absurd for someone without freewill.  Social engineers for the most part cannot understand this obvious truth because of determinism.

As soon as you start treating people as cogs in a machine civilization will break down because it is dependent on cooperation.  Cooperation is an oxymoron without freewill.  Deprive people of freewill, agency, dignity, and meaning and society will break down.  
The philosophy behind freewill is oddly tied to religion.  Religion it turns out bridges the gap between physical and abstract reality.  It recognizes physical restraints but creates abstract possibilities.  It provides a basis for virtue that is impossible to make rational from a deterministic perspective.  Even Nietzsche went down the wrong path when he denied freewill to the masses.  He saw the effect of killing god but not the cause of those effects.  There are modern philosophers that understand what is happening but they are not popular.  The burden of freewill is too great for most people to bear.  Every action becomes a matter of responsibility.  Worse still a population engrossed in narcissism and nihilism would have to give up that escapism.  In part that explains why luxus tends to destroy civilizations.

My final thought is that biological determinism is real, it just isn't what people think it is.