The paper examines the range of national experiences of communist rule
in terms of the aspiration to ‘overtake and outstrip the advanced
countries economically’. It reviews the causal beliefs of the rulers, the rise
and fall of their economies (or, in the case of China, its continued rise), the
core institutions of communist rule and their evolution, and other
outcomes. The process of overcoming a development lag so as to
approach the global technological frontier has required continual
institutional change and policy reform in the face of resistance from
established interests. So far, China is the only country where communist
rule has been able to meet this requirement, enabled by a new deal with
political and economic stakeholders. The paper places the “China Deal” on
a spectrum previously limited to the Soviet Big and Little Deals
