Economics Professor Loretta Napoleoni, is the author of "Maonomics: Why The Chinese Make Better Capitalists Than We Do".  In it, she ascribes China's success to their flexibility.  Having witnessed the demise of communism  in Russia, China, in a bid to ward off a similar fate, decided to pump money into the infrastructure.  This they did by tempting foreign investors with the promise of cheap labour, which in turn, gave many Chinese people an opportunity to earn money, and thus create a middle class.  She thinks the West can learn a lot from China but that we are too ideological, too rigid.  The West must produce more in order to slow the shifting balance of power from West to East.