The Big Read: President Jacob Zuma's trip to China took place in the context of its becoming the second largest economy in the world. By 2030 it might well be the largest.

This trip follows another recent excursion, with an entourage of officials and businessmen, to India.

The government holds up both countries as worthy of emulating as regards their growth and development strategies.

The success of both India and China in terms of economic growth, technological innovation and their ability to lift millions of people out of poverty, has been met with awe. This being said, neither country boasts a sublime peace between the "haves and have nots". There is still a great deal of social unrest and inequality. But we cannot ignore their achievements and what influenced them.

At a very superficial level, conditions in China and India after independence didn't look far off where South Africa is today.

South Africa's political economy, however, is closer to India than it is to China.

China was mired in revolutionary ideology and extreme levels of poverty that swept the country and affected the majority peasant population.

The Chinese revolution too was far more pernicious against private capital and the landed class. The propertied class and owners of capital were hounded out, ending up either in Taiwan or Hong Kong.

In comparison, India's national movement was largely a middle-class affair. India inherited a well-trained bureaucracy schooled in British ways in which bureaucrats saw themselves more as British than Indian. Their class aspirations also tended to be different compared to those of the general populace. If there was any affinity between the middle class and rural population, it was a result of expediency.

The national movement there, just like our own, accommodated the propertied class and capital, while at the same time allowing workers' movements and other tendencies to flourish.

Today, unlike India and South Africa where there is a clear divide between private enterprise and state, in China it is a lot murkier. Private capital can't really operate independently from state control and influence.

India relied on its middle class, capitalist entrepreneurs and the state elites as the major drivers of the economy. The reason India's inequality is higher than China's - and here it shares a trait with South Africa - is that capital accumulation is dominated by the propertied classes, the professional and educated elite and owners of capital. The peasantry and working class tend to be the worse off from the growth in the economy, and whatever benefits may have come from national growth in capital.

Both India and South Africa have greater levels of ethnic, class, racial and religious diversity than China, which make the organic spread of wealth more challenging and require greater interventionist policies than they are willing to exercise to create a more equitable political economy.

If there is a lesson to be brought home from Zuma's various trips it is that democracy or political liberalisation in and of itself will not guarantee economic freedom. The lesson from China is less about the merits of "political discipline", which Zuma so admires, than it is about the structure and ownership of key assets and levers within the economy: China went against the conventional Washington Consensus model of economic development and evolved its own model of economic policy.

Both China and India also tell us that we have to graft our own unique economic model with a deep understanding and appreciation of our own political economy as well as when best to use state intervention and in what ways the market, with proper oversight, can contribute to broader social welfare. - © SACSIS. Fakir is an independent writer based in Cape Town.