Those other Asian countries are generally as wealthy as they are because of Western countries strategically dumping large amounts of wealth into them during the Cold war, in essentially a form of global wealth redistibution in which the super profits from imperalizing other regions went towards developing these nations to compete with N. Vietnam, DPRK, PRC, etc. The same occured in Europe with the Marshall plan. This is why my conservative history teacher said that the losers of WWII (Germany and Japan) were really the winners, seeing how they managed to eclipse the old powers of the UK and France postwar. China has many obvious surface level similarities to the Asian Tigers, mainly being the use of markets with extensive government oversite, public planning/investment, and a greater degree of public ownership than in Neoliberalism. One important historical difference is that China was not recieving the same massive foreign investment as its neighbors, and had to essentially “trick” the west into doing this by allowing foreign industry in to exploit some workers under controlled conditions. This is obviously a risky strategy, but seems to have worked out quite well, as the relative low cost and high skill of laborers and the amount of existing infrastructure made it a deal that just couldnt be turned down. Few other existing socialist nations have had these factors in enough proportions to seduce Western investment, which is generally discouraged to go towards socialist nations for obvious reasons. All I have described took place during and following Dengs liberalization, starting in 1978. China essentially “hid its power level”(acted lib enough) well enough for the west to buy in and give it a seat at the table (WTO around 2001, etc), and most leaders and pundits in the West believed it would continue its course. Today there are many of the same people announcing that china indeed “tricked us,” but actions prove this too, such as the continuing nationalization, extending all the way to things like rental properies, which have been being begun to be expropriated in North China recently. The one thing that makes China’s Socialist path most obvious to me though is the style and amount of fearmongering that has been pumped out about it over the past few decades, and this growth of CHINABAD seems to line up directly with the period following the height of liberalization circa 2001, as over the slow period from then to now it has become obvious that liberalization is not what western interests hoped it to be. For other big differences between China and the Asian Tigers, ask these questions: Are there capitlists in government? How many? Are they ever rightfully prosecuted and do they have assets seized/nationalized when they commit crimes? Is Marxism taught in schools? Is it the ideology of the state/ruling party? Is banking public? Is there a large or any amount of cooperatives? Youll find the answers for China differ very much from those of the Asian tigers, in ways that lend much credibility to the idea of it being ×1000 closer to Socialism than any Asian tiger. Truthfully, i believe China is in, though probably quite close to the end of, a state capitalist phase. This makes complete sense considering PRC in 1978 was much more underdeveloped than the semi-industrialized, petite commodity economy of the USSR at the start of the NEP. The USSR came out of the NEP and implented Socialism; Considering much longer and insanely succesful state-cap period, as well as much more stable circumstances than interwar period USSR, i have plenty of faith China is correctly treading the path to Communism.