I am not suggesting that you compare China to other Japan today rather how quickly they become industrialized.  In 1965, Japan's nominal GDP was estimated at just over $91 billion. Fifteen years later, the nominal GDP had soared to a record $1.065 trillion by 1980. (11x growth in 15 years.) By comparison China's growth from 1989 to 2004 was ~9x (from your chart).  At the time there was a lot of talk about Japan taking over the world, which did not happen for various reasons, primarily because once you get to near parity with the rest of the world further economic development requires innovation.<p>As to poor returns I meant that China's growth has been has increased as they approached a free market, and there is little evidence to support the advantage (in terms of growth) of a non free market.  Which was a response to <i>I'm not convinced that an open, free-market system is the best solution. Perhaps down the road, but not now.</i><p>PS: I am not saying china's growth is slow, rather young people don't have a lot to compare it to. Industrialization and effective free markets result in massive economic growth.  So I don't think the Chinese government is responsible for growth so much as letting it happen.<p>Edit: As to corruption it's something you have to see first hand.  It has many forms but look at Google for a classic  example. The most blatant example of which was they used DNS to randomly point to Google's competitor; now just think about what that means.  Sadly this is closer to the norm than most people acknowledge.