By Stephen Green, head of the Asia programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London
The one thing keeping the world's last great Communist party in power is, ironically, the element Karl Marx railed against most: private capital. Hence the Chinese government's apparent willingness finally to put private enterprise on an equal legal footing with state-owned businesses. But private enterprise needs much more than constitutional tinkering.
Since China's economic reforms in the 1970s, it has been the people who put their own money on the line - to open restaurants, manufacture household products and research genetic medicines - who have driven the rise in living standards. Transition to capitalism in China has come not with a bang, as in the former Soviet bloc, but with a whimper.
