"Funny how that hasn't happened under Mao who, presumably, was running a "better" system. And really, is India that resource-poor compared to China? Enough to explain the difference in growth rates?"

No; Mao was essentially running the same system as the USSR: state ownership of the MoP, operated for socialist ends, according to central planning doctrine--the same incentive-less structure for both government and workers. The only thing that's changed was a kind of democratization of the ends--they now had to be somewhat responsive to the demands of the global market for China to achieve its export-oriented growth. However, China's domestic market remains essentially constrained by planning.

On the other hand, India is, per the definition we seemed to have agreed on in the other comment thread, no more than nominally democratic (government unaccountable to public demands in a practical sense). However, because it is nominally a democracy, it can't just go around doing whatever it wants, meaning it has the inefficiency of meeting public demands, the same kind of handicaps to growth as much richer countries, and the inefficiency of a government which is unresponsive to the public. At the same time, this façade means that the average Indian citizen can't just be abjectly angry with the Indian government: he can and has to vote the current people out for a new group, if it's so bad.

China doesn't have to worry about that. Really, the Chinese system is just so incredibly messed up that it seems to be working, for now, in spite of itself. And it's not the future slow itself down that's a problem; if having to maintain a growth rate of 8% or better forever is problematic, which we seem to agree is the case, and China's governmental system will collapse without that, then it's unclear in how, in the long-term, it's really a better system. I'll put it to you this way: which system of governance would be easiest to drop into a wealthy, democratic, Western society which isn't experiencing rapid economic growth: India's or China's?

"Did they? I am not at all sure about that. Granted, trustworthy statistics are hard to come by, but it does seem to me that the living standards of the Chinese people rose much faster and further than those of Russians under Stalin. The Russians were building heavy industry plants -- just like Mao did -- and while certainly useful (as WW2 demonstrated), they didn't do much for ordinary people."

We're not here arguing about the speed or duration of improvement of living standards; we're arguing about end-states. In both China and the USSR, living standards did increase dramatically for most people. And the difference is, again, partially attributable to the difference in the technological convergence space between China and the USSR. Imperial Russia was already a minor industrial power before the revolution; China was barely industrialized to any extent before Deng's reforms in the 80's, meaning it had nearly a century of growth to catch up on. In consideration of the facts that in neither case do we have democratization of ownership or responsiveness to a market, and in both cases convergence will end, and you see why they did/will stall and fall.

"Initial ones? Or all the time -- meaning claims to ownership can be granted or taken away by the polity at will? If the latter, I would object to calling this "ownership", it's much more akin to a mere license."

Initial ones; they'd be dealt out at birth to be utilized at the appropriate time, 14, or 15, or 18, or whatever age a particular vision of the Public Good decides it should be. Think of them like citizenship cards: no matter what country (or vision of the Public Good) you're born into, you get one, and you can't legally sell it. These differ primarily in that no one could take it away from you, either, as it's a claim to your own labor as much as anything else, and you're free to go to whatever vision of the Public Good appeals to you at that pre-designated age; in that way, they're more like passports.

"That's how the ownership of the former Soviet factories, etc. was distributed in the early 1990s.. Basically everyone who worked at a particular factory got a "share" of ownership of that factory in the form of the so-called "voucher". You can google up how well that worked. On the other hand, if you mean non-transferable ownership then it's not really ownership and I don't see much use in it."

Well, the problem is, once again, that those were ownership stakes in state-owned factories--once again, state-owned in a non-democratic system is owned by the class of people who were members of the state government, i.e. members of a private class.

When you say "non-transferable", do you mean "non-exchangeable"? Because it seems to me as though one thing that ownership ought to be is non-transferable. I can offer to "transfer" my ownership of a particular piece of property to you in exchange for something you own, or, just as easily for you, you can try to kick me out without having to exchange anything. Short of killing me, you can't take away my labor, or, in the scenario we've been working out, my claim to ownership of the MoP, and if you kill me, then neither you nor anyone else gets it, either.

This is where we can bring in both Kant and Rawls; if I devise a moral law (e.g. people ought to try to take others' ownership claims from them by force) which I would not apply to myself, I can hardly call it a law. On the other hand, if I don't know whether I'll be put in the position of the person who has an ownership claim, or a person who tries to take that ownership claim, and we all agree that one of these is a bad thing, then we simply won't let this scenario arise. This is, again, essentially the market acting on morals: not enough people want for this thing to happen, so it won't.