4 Legs Good, 2 Legs Better  

Slate has an article complaining its hard to find actual communists in communist China - and that the government is worried the people would try to redistribute property if the country were to adopt democracy - Karl Who?. I think some guy wrote a book about this once...

While class struggle and common ownership of property may have motivated the revolution, Mao's heirs are more interested in outcomes than process. At least a dozen times, officials and businesspeople have quoted Deng Xiaoping's line about not caring whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches the mouse. Chinese structures—whether socioeconomic theories or apartment buildings—don't have to be elegant; they just have to stand up. And so far, 30 years into the great China experiment, the elites are confident that the grafting of capitalism onto a state-controlled economy, overseen by a government controlled by a Communist Party, is standing up. ...

Of course, in China, Marxist morality shifts over time. And today, the most moral thing that Chinese policies and people can do is promote economic growth and development, regardless of the distributional outcomes. In our time in China, we heard several reasons why the massive country simply couldn't adopt Western-style democracy. The population is too large and too diverse. Democracy promotes the sort of arguing that hinders growth. The performance of other Asian countries seemed to have suffered when fractious democracies emerged from authoritarian or military rule. Xu added a new one: It would promote unhealthy class warfare. If elections were to be held in a large geographical area where gaps between the rich and poor are wide, and in which people have different educational backgrounds, "it might cause turbulences to society," he said. "If somebody just went out in the street and shouted, 'I will divide the property of rich people into poor people,' I think he would be elected. But it is useless, as parity will not solve the problem of economic development.