I think the jury is still out. China has a long way left to develop and a huge populace still toiling without the benefits of that wealth. And some of the ways the economic development has happened are IMO temporarily and not durable.
> There was legitimate hope it would think and plan for the long term. With a dictator, however, short-term political survival dominates all else. And so we get the absurdity of a billion peoples' productive power being channeled into stamping out Winnie the Pooh imagery.
In fairness, I'm not sure that's a huge fraction of the billion peoples' productive power. ;P
