How wonderful is the Chinese model to development?

As a teenager, when I started worrying-yes, worrying--about the ills that seemingly were all around in India, the communist parties looked quite attractive an option to me.  They promised to take care of the disadvantaged, and it resonated with me.

It didn't take me long, however, to understand that in politics, the color of the stripe didn't matter at all and that every party was out to screw the people.  It then boiled down to who was the least worst because there wasn't any "good" option.

Over the years, as much as I have accepted a liberal democratic capitalism as the least screwy of all the options humans have tried out thus far, there remains a nagging feeling all the time: are we doing anything for the horribly disadvantaged?

This is the question that then makes me obsess over the India versus China comparisons. 

Thus, reading a book review essay in the NYRB made my Sunday :)

The book is about China's development and Deng Xiaoping's role in the country's "transformation."  wonderful essay where the reviewer brings in a personal dimension too, and opens the piece by highlighting how much the China model appeals to many other developing countries for all the wrong reasons:

Mao Zedong died in September 1976. From 1979 until the years just before Deng Xiaoping’s own death in 1997, Deng was, in fact if not always in title, the top leader of the Communist Party of China, of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Chinese government. He is known outside China, especially in the West, mainly for his decision in 1989 to send field armies with tanks into the heart of Beijing to carry out what came to be known as the “Tiananmen Massacre”: a bloody suppression of unarmed students and other citizens who were demonstrating peacefully in and around Tiananmen Square. Not everyone in the world has looked unfavorably on Deng’s decision. On February 22, 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring,” Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi had this to say about it:

People in front of tanks were crushed. The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square…. When Tiananmen Square happened, tanks were sent in to deal with them. It’s not a joke. I will do whatever it takes to make sure part of the country isn’t taken away.

Deng’s example of the utility of massacre had not been lost on Qaddafi.

China came down hard on "Occupy Tiananmen" and the country continues to be a notorious poster for the lack of human rights.

Even as most of the world has been awed by its economic success and countries like Rwanda want to emulate this model of a strong pro-capitalist state that tightly constrains individual freedoms, the reviewer writes about how much the economic growth has benefited whom:

the claim that Deng “lifted” millions from poverty confuses the doer and the receiver of action. To the extent that economic “lifting” has happened in post-Mao times, it has been the menial labor of hundreds of millions of people—working without labor unions, or a free press, or a neutral judiciary, or protections like OSHA rules—that has done the heavy lifting. This workforce has improved not just the lives of the millions themselves but, even more, of the Communist elite, who in many cases have soared to stratospheric heights of opulence. World Bank figures show that in China the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality in populations, has skyrocketed from 0.16 before Deng’s reforms to a current 0.47, near the high end of the scale. This dramatic change has much less to say about “hundreds of millions” than it does about one of the maxims that Deng delivered at the outset of reform: “Let a part of the population get rich first.”

While in graduate school, which was when I got to watch on television the tanks in Tiananmen Square, I always hesitated discussing such topics with graduate students from China.  It was almost an unwritten rule that this topic was off limits.  Once, I accidentally crossed that line and asked a classmate, "R," about Tibet.  He sensed where I was going and immediately made it clear that Tibet is, and always has been, a part of China and that the government would, therefore, take every possible to step to keep the country whole.

The simplistic bottom-line seems to be that the China model provides economic growth and keeps the country unified, whereas the India model struggles with both.

After all these years of formal and casual approaches to understanding these issues, I find that I haven't resolved anything in my mind.

Should I consider such a lack of resolution as a sign of intellectual and moral weakness on my part, or as a sign of continued and healthy engagement on such topics of vital importance?