askchapo

The liberalization of the Russian economy was shock liberalism to the extreme. Zero transition, some “ownership vouchers” the people got as a perfunctory nod to the state capital being public, but that quickly descended into a speculative market, which given the lack of guard rails meant an oligarchy formed. So the sudden fallout of social services plus a non-competitive market meant millions of pre-mature deaths, brain drain, corruption.

China, on the other hand, engaged in a system of requiring the factories of making X number of widgets per month or quarter for the state, but then allowed them to sell anything production past that on the market. This allowed for the introduction of markets in a controlled, gradual way, maintained government ownership to an extent (this is why so many Chinese corporations are owned in no small part by the state, a lot of them were spin offs the state kept an interest in), while avoiding the productivity downtime issue that Marxist-Leninist economies can sometimes run into. This is also why, while China has a capitalist class, it’s on a much tighter leash than in social democratic economies.