What are the alternatives? Transferring from state-owned economy to privately owned one has to happen somehow. The experiment with straightforward privatisation, as done in Eastern European countries after 1989 was a disaster at least comparable to what's going on in China now.
One question might be to what extent the political structure even makes the difference. China's neighbor India has quite different political structures, for example, but shares many of the problems with corruption (perhaps to an even larger extent).
I don't know. Members of the generation of my mother and my grandmother tend to blame privatization for all the downfall of Polish economy. There is something to that if you look at how railoads are managed right now - it's a stinking pile of corruption and theft, and the surprising thing is that it works at all.
Well, I am from Slovakia and the privatisation lead to 10-15 of Mafia-style capitalism. Of course, the situation was and still is much worse further to the east.
