Sanjoy Banerjee is a professor of international relations at San Francisco State University, and an expert on east and south Asia.

The passing of Deng Xiaoping provides an occasion to reflect on the system he created. The Chinese now hope to follow the trajectory of South Korea, Taiwan, or better still Singapore. They have developed an authoritarian capitalist society under the leadership of a Leninist party and hope that it endures at least long enough to raise the living standards of Chinese to those enjoyed by their eastern neighbors. Yet the Chinese experiment is on many times the scale -- 25 to 400 times -- of the countries they are emulating. That is likely to make a difference.

Countries react in particular ways when the balance of world power is at stake -- and the East Asian authoritarian capitalist model depends critically on how the rest of the world reacts. William Safire's recent suggestion that the US cut trade with China in order to keep it weak is a chilling reminder of the possibilities. China is forced to perform a very delicate balancing act between attracting and provoking the United States and other major powers.

China's economic achievement is much celebrated. However, recent revisions of World Bank estimates suggest that China's living standard is one-and-a-half times that of India's, not double as previously thought. The revision will do little to affect the world's assessment of China's power, which depends more on exports, imports, and military strength, estimates of which are unchanged. But it may tell us something about the viability of the Chinese political system.

China's party dictatorship justifies itself by its economic performance alone -- the Maoist ideological justification for Communist Party rule has been abandoned. If Chinese economic growth slows down, or if popular perceptions of that growth sour, a post-Deng regime will have no base of legitimacy. East Asian capitalist dictatorship-states were able to remain stable in their early stages by maintaining high rates of growth and with a guarantee of US support, as demonstrated in Korea and Vietnam. China is very much on its own politically, and for a fifth of humanity it could not be otherwise.

Deng Xiaoping transformed China from a self-destructive totalitarian state into a more open regime that has gained a dominant position in global light manufacturing. It may well be able to climb the technological ladder as its wealthier neighbors have. But current regime's narrow basis of justification is itself a source of instability.