>You have to admit that China in the last 20 years has been an absolute growth machine. I often see it argued that it's "fake" because the party subsidizes a lot of economic ventures, but even then they are building one hell of a domestic market.

It's not so much "they're pumping the numbers by cooking the books", it's more of the regime being at the right place at the right time. Other east asian countries industrialized at the same time without the CCP, for instance.