Bahrain was the Gulf’s Tiananmen now comes the Chinese-style growth « ArabianMoney

Trying to make sense of the Arab Uprisings of the past four months and to understand what this means for the future of the Middle East and North Africa has become a major preoccupation for analysts who often draw parallels with events that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Then all the former East European communist dictatorships were toppled, while in China there was a brutal suppression of the democratic opposition in Tiananmen Square. Twenty-two years later and the Chinese communist party is much changed but still very much in power, and China has enjoyed one of the most rapid rises to economic dominance in world history.

It is debatable whether this would or would not have happened under more democratic rule, but a centralised command economy is generally acknowledged as the more efficient economic development model.