China: The New Russia?

That was then:

Post-Soviet business oligarchs include relatives or close associates of government officials, even government officials themselves, as well as criminal bosses who achieved vast wealth by acquiring state assets very cheaply (or for free) during the privatization process controlled by the Yeltsin government…Although the majority of oligarchs were not formally related with the communist party of the Soviet Union, there are allegations that they were promoted (at least initially) by the communist apparatchiks, with strong connections to Soviet power structures and access to the monetary funds of the communist party.

This is now:

[A]bout 90 per cent of China’s billionaires are the children of high-ranking officials…The princelings began staking out their dominions in the business world in the 1980s when China was opening up its economy. Armed with their fathers’ connections, they were able to exploit the opportunities thrown up by China’s economic transformation.

China’s “Princelings”, while out of the public eye, are slowly emerging as the new Russian oligarchs. The similarity is striking; as a so-called communist country slowly opens up, a select few at the top understandably stake claims before the free-for-all. And now, in 2009, China’s oligarchs are more powerful than ever.

One big difference worth noting, however, is how the fall of the USSR was, in the end, a top-down revolution, while China’s changes (economic for now) seem mostly bottom-up. A recent visitor to Beijing noted how any financial transations—prostitution, drug-selling, cockfighting—are free to take place so long as they remain strictly economic and politically neutral. Moscow’s black markets weren’t nearly as robust before the regime ultimately fell.