It's not Marxist economics

So here we are again, with the Chinese Communist regime taking credit for all the improvements in China since they won the civil war in 1949, and foreign leftists like Hugo Chavez holding out China as an example of what wonderful things can be accomplished under "socialism." But what would China be like now if the Communists had not won power in 1949? Much richer, much freer, and not much less equal, either.

The right comparison is not between China in 1949 and China now. It is between China's economic progress since 1949 and that achieved by its neighbors that were in a roughly similar state of development at that time. The two closest parallels are South Korea and the "other China," Taiwan. Both had been Japanese colonies for decades before 1945, so they were a bit ahead of the mainland -- but then Taiwan's population grew overnight by almost 40 percent in 1949 as Nationalist refugees from the lost civil war flooded in, and Korea was devastated by the war of 1950-53.

Both Taiwan and South Korea were ruled for the next three decades by oppressive and ruthless military regimes. Neither country adopted raw free-market capitalism -- the state protected infant industries and nourished them with low-interest capital -- but at least they weren't tied to Marxist economics. By the 1980s both countries had achieved economic takeoff, and democracy came soon afterward.