Mark Steyn says that China is not a psychologically healthy state; don’t let the facade fool you. "If the People’s Republic is now the workshop of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop...But Maoists with stock options are still Maoists - especially when they owe their robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus." He warns--rightly, I think--that "Commie-capitalism" is not exatcly what they would have us believe it is. And this will not turn out to be the Chinese century. He then passes to India as a related question:

India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.

Read the whole well-crafted piece.