Economic Growth in Contemporary China and the USSR

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I have offered the below comment here:

Nick, 

You raise two fascinating issues in your response: (1) "...  similarity with the former USSR in terms of excessive state directed investment which worked for a while but then began to become less productive ..." and (2) " ... the free market, if there is such a thing."

I think, (1) and (2) are related to one another - in a way perhaps that makes me wonder in which manner did the USSR and contemporary China diverge from/correspond to each other in directing investment? 

I suspect there are huge and fundamental differences. 

And these differences bring up the second point: I agree that there cannot possibly be anything like a perfectly free market, not least because the meaning of a free market as defined in classical and neoclassical economics is preposterously unrealistic. 

But there is a large difference between an obtusive command economy like it had prevailed in the USSR (perhaps with the exception of the NEP period and toward the end of the system) and the "degrees of freedom" left to companies, entrepreneurs and other self-motivated individuals and institutions in contemporary China - just think of the exposure to foreign economic agents which was virtually nonexistent in and not desired by the USSR, while quite the opposite is true as far as China goes. 

So, how much freer is the Chinese economy and what difference does this greater freedom make in the performance potential of an economy? And not to overemphasise the aspect of freedom (in a political sense), let me add that I include in the concept of freedom: optionality, the possibility of coming up with new, different and multifarious options to a certain way of going about things. I suspect this kind of openness to options and option-providers (foreigners, entrepreneurs, different management styles of public agents etc.) accounts for a fundamental difference between the USSR and China.

Until the death of Stalin, growth was hardly of a different quality than during the age of the Pharaohs (throw as many warm bodies at a goal as can be press-ganged into compliance) coming from a very low level of economic development. In the years after Stalin's death, there was a lot of catching up to do after WW II, which again certainly has veiled the low quality of growth behind impressive figures.

He who denies, like I do, that there are free markets (as qualified above) must still try to account for huge differences in development models and performance levels that come with different degrees of economic freedom.