The upcoming 16th Congress of the Communist Party of China in autumn has given rise to numerous predictions about possible changes in China's domestic and international course. More often than others, there are assumptions about the upcoming radical changes, the need for which is caused by the supposedly insurmountable contradiction between market transformations and the "totalitarian" political system. A variation of this view of the situation is the equally common thesis that the system features of the PRC hinder the success of the policy of openness to the outside world, intensive economic development and the formation of the information economy; accordingly, official accession to the WTO (completed in December 2001) will be a prologue to the dismantling of the state structure in its current form, to At the same time, they do not exclude "explosions", "collapses" and other unpleasant phenomena in the PRC 1 . The notion of the gap between economics and politics (or the constraining effect of politics on the economy) in modern China seems to me to be a delusion. And not only because of the duration, exceptionally high dynamics and versatile nature of the country's recovery in the last twenty - odd years-an undoubted indirect evidence of a fairly harmonious combination of politics and economy. The fact is that the years that have passed since the beginning of the Asian financial crisis in 1997-1998 do not give reason to believe that there are reasonable alternatives to the current Chinese development model, which previously could still be found in neighboring countries and territories of the new industrial type. The time for success based on deep involvement in world economic relations seems to have passed. Moreover, these years have shown that the success of the PRC is associated not so much with the new industrial model, partially embodied in Chinese economic practice, but with the preservation (albeit in a modified form) of a number of important differences from ... Read more