The land that failed to fail: How China caught up with the West

The Star  November 21, 2018
China’s communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail. China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other…read more.