Chinese history

 

Consider:

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/07/12/1080091/china-as-a-post-capital-economy/

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/xi-touts-communist-party-as-defender-of-confuciuss-virtues/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=tw-share&_r=0

 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140645/eric-x-li/party-of-the-century

I think I underestimate the severity of the Cultural Revolution. (In Jung Chang's memoir, for instance, on her travels to the gulag where her father is imprisoned, she witnesses outright civil war where various factions had armed themselves with tanks and artillery.) And in terms of more general trends I speculate that any sort of centralisation in the 1950s was illusory.

Deng Xiaoping was arresting a decline in central authority that began in the 1820s (and the harshness of the One Child Policy an indication of how worried he was). Xi Jinping is enthusiastically taking up the challenge. (And traditional Confucianism is very centralist.)

One consequence is that we should not underestimate the capacity of the Chinese state to liquidate vested interests (As Kaminska is arguing).

And Depressions are merely capital-holders fighting haircuts with varying degrees of burnt ground. China can easily do without the upside, the West having already invented stuff through its strong capital protection regime.