Steve Chapman on Why Chinese Communists No Longer Put Much Stock in Communism

Wal-Mart has 370 stores in China, and Starbucks has more than 570. Mao's masses thronged the streets on bicycles. Today's Chinese sit in late-model cars in endless traffic jams. All this began some three decades ago, when the People's Republic gave up trying to forcibly redesign human nature in favor of making the best of it. So thorough is the outward transformation, writes Steve Chapman, that it's often hard to remember—or quite believe—that this is an officially communist country.