Indeed, the old socialist economic birdcage has now been largely burst by China's capitalist reforms, releasing with a vengeance a mutant people's republic into the global marketplace of consumerism.

The old state planner Chen Yuan once cautioned that Chinese reformers had created a birdcage economy in which a capitalist bird was growing within a socialist cage. His inference was that, unless Party leaders were careful, this capitalist bird would literally burst out of its socialist cage, spelling an end to China's Marxist Leninist revolution.