Ironically you can map China's progress over the last 30 years directly with their adoption of capitalistic policies.

The more capitalistic they become, the more growth they have seen.

To be fair, Deng Xiaoping's reforms were based on the older New Economic Policy or NEP from the 1920s USSR, so it had been tried at that point. It was scrapped in the USSR for other reasons, not because it failed.

Exactly, maybe we've got it all wrong :)

The word you're looking for is dictatorship, and it is not new.