> China is just a bit repressive, don't you think? No troublesome
> things like unions make U.S. capital very happy to take advantage of
> its educated, healthy, and disciplined workforce.
It's hideously repressive, and there's no question its official Marxism is merely one more state religion of productivism, no different from the Kuomintang, the PAP or the Park regime. But its ruling elites have been very, very savvy about disciplining the marketplace; they keep tight controls on their capital markets and key technologies, keep foreign firms on a very short leash, invest in science and education, etc.
Not that I have any great affection for the developmental state. It's just an objective feature of the world-system these days which deserves analysis. There's an interesting paper on Singapore's role in jumpstarting China's developmental state by Alexius Pereira at: <http://www.albany.edu/csda/shanghai-paper/pereira.pdf>. Apparently, Singapore created an industrial park in Souzhou, which did very well for a number of years, and then the Chinese created their *own* industrial park using the former as a model -- pissing off Lee Kuan Yew, who promptly sold off Singapore's stake in the former. To paraphrase Baudrillard, copies of copies are sometimes more original than the original!
-- Dennis