I beg to differ here , it does not quite work when you have an opulent upper class and the rest will start to wonder why they are in that situation.

This is what happened in South Africa and in also France as it does not take much to figure out that political freedom is required to make a fundamental change.

I think in China the ruling party elite seemingly were not so much different from the peasants in the beginning and everybody lives improved overall as they adopted Mao's two systems approach.