Free Republic

SPIEGEL: After the stock market turbulences, does it surprise you that people have started to worry? Zhang: China has consistently surprised us. When I returned from the United States 20 years ago, it was unimaginable that we would end up where we are now. What China has achieved defies all logic. I credit this to the hard work and enterprising spirit of the Chinese people. SPIEGEL: Can you give an example? Zhang: I am a runner. Last October, there was a marathon here in Beijing. I didn't participate this time, but friends told me that the run wasn't prepared too...

After Lenin seized power in the USSR in 1917, he instituted a repressive policy of seizing industry, farms, banks and almost all productive enterprises (without compensation), a policy called “War Communism” (essentially communism as we know it today). It was an unmitigated disaster. There were famines, diseases and a general breakdown in production. Because of these failures, in 1921 he ordered a major change called the New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed significant private ownership for small business and gave peasants a share of their output. This rapidly improved the economy that had been devastated by WWI and his earlier...