They were fairly successful too (which is not the same thing as being nice, of course).

Many argue that this was only because until the last decade and a half Chinese society has been fairly archaic, indeed pre-industrial in many aspects such as culture, and could be directed by accordingly simple means. It takes a lot more patience, wisdom and subtlety to steer an economy which depends upon Silicon Valley enterpreteurs (as shown by its nearly universal mishandling today, although I know nothing about what should be done) than a forcefully industrialized one with many leftovers of a collectivist agrarian one - because both formal and informal relations in it are different; in Marxist terms, both the productive forces and the relations of production have been undergoing a dramatic shift in China.

Remember, almost all the talk about "democracy" and "human rights" in China is nonsense because it looks at politics first, while these concepts (concrete enough, just mostly misconstructed) arguably depend upon an economic foundation (as described by Marx) first, a nation's culture (as mostly ignored by Marx) second, and only lastly upon the formal systems and fleeting power arrangements that are "Politics" in the narrow sense. I'm not a Marxist, I just think that the Marxist approach (see e.g. Slavoi Zizek) is uncharacteristically clear and spot-on in this particular regard.

(This is a forward payment of sorts for my long-promised post on the economic underpinnings of democracy and freedom.)