[wqaatwt]

Taiwan and South Korea were ruled by quite brutal dictatorships until the 80s - 90s. Massive growth only started when they sorted that out. Of of course we must attribute China’s success to significant liberalization and the rejection of Maoism (at least in practice) even, though it’s still quite far from a real democracy.

China was extremely mismanaged until the 90s as well and wasn’t really ahead of India. If anything they missed out on 30-40 years of actual development until Mao and other exceptionally incompetent lunatics died out.