From Doug Casey in Conversations with Casey:

... [L]et's recognize that communism was a very short-term aberration in the 5,000-year grand scheme of Chinese history. Mao only ruled the country for about 30 years. Since the late ‘70s, China's been returning to its old ways.
 
Everybody knows that the Communist Party in China is nothing but a scam for its members to cream something off the top of everything. It's ludicrous to say China is a communist country. It's easier to do business in China than it is in the U.S. – lower taxes, less regulation, fewer legal hassles.

In point of fact, the Chinese are reverting to the mean. For many centuries, up until the Industrial Revolution, China was much wealthier than the West. Now it's rising again.

As far as the United States is concerned, unfortunately it's going the other way. The issue has nothing to do with democracy. Democracy is just mob rule dressed up in a sports coat. It's much overrated. The U.S. government is becoming more powerful, and the U.S. is radically departing from the economic philosophy of free markets that made it great. It's simultaneously becoming more politically repressive. The Chinese are just reverting to their traditional economic philosophy, which is not communism, it's capitalist trade and production.

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