In Evan Osnos’s damning portrait of Xi-ist China he quotes the economist Xu Chenggang:

In the U.S., you have a jungle of free competition, dozens of laboratories competing—no one knows what is going to work. But the Communist regime will not allow for this. That’s the key issue.

To whit: the classic contrast between free-market capitalism and state communism.

But I wonder: assuming this is true, is it the capitalism part that’s powerful here? Or is it the relative anarchy of a “free market”? And are there other ways to harness that freedom beyond capitalism?