China’s Princelings Build the Wrong Kind of Capitalism

Over the last three decades, Communist China’s leaders have lifted more than 600 million of their citizens out of poverty -- and built one of the world’s most unequal societies.

Those two outcomes didn’t have to go hand in hand. They are the result of a conscious decision by the former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and some of his closest associates -- the so-called Eight Immortals -- to safeguard the primacy of the Communist Party by putting their families in charge of opening up China’s economy.