Its limitations were revealed at the point when the Chinese economy had to move towards more complex levels and intensive forms of industrialisation. Moreover, misrepresenting China's past also helps to build Indian illusions about its own future. We need neither absorb the positive lessons of that early Chinese experience nor bother much about the fact that its transition from the pre-liberalisation to the liberalisation era is so different that it makes the very content and impact of its liberalisation programme different from ours. For all the brouhaha about its global potential, the defining aspect of China's experience over the last 20 years has not been outward assertion but its fundamental involution of preoccupations. Leave aside for the moment the Realist misreading of the nature of the world order we are heading towards and its corresponding exaggerations of the shaping power of states.
China is still a long way from being a candidate that can even half-plausibly play such a role.
Over the next 20 years its principal challenge will remain internal and it will be, beyond everything else, starkly political. The era of revolution and profound political turmoil has not yet fully passed China by.