There has never been a country like the People's Republic of China. It is at once a developed nation (Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and several dozen other industrial cities) and the largest underdeveloped population in the world, out in the villages, sending their daughters and to a lesser degree their sons, off to work in the industrial megaplexes, where one girl sending home most of her salary at a plant making shower curtain rings can inject more cash flow into her home village than several dozen families.
It is a First World country with something like colonies galore in the backlands. Not even England in the early 1800's can compare with it.
The growth rate has been at around 10% per year for a decade. No capitalist country has managed that, not even the US after WWI or WWII, where the industrial capacity of Europe was wrecked war.
The growth rate in China could continue for maybe another ten years.
Mao was a total incompetent from an economic point of view. The leaders of the PRC are not at all incompetent, and they do not get the blame when stuff goes wrong: it is that doltish local guy that gets all the blame. Pretty much the opposite of what we have in the US, where people blame Obama for not closing Guantanamo, when it is clearly Congress that has made this impossible.
The US economy is not recovering rapidly because companies are not expanding and hiring, and a lot of the blame lies with the banks, which have a stranglehold on money they will not lend. Companies prefer to work their employees harder, and the employees do so, because there are all those hungry jobless people they know that can replace them.
