LONDON -- Arriving in Beijing on Aug. 23 for his third China visit in five years, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez praised the country's Communist leaders to the skies for having rescued China from a "practically feudal" situation and made it one of the world's largest economies in less than half a century. It was an entirely predictable remark by the firebrand Venezuelan leader. It was also entirely wrong.

According to Chavez, China's emergence as a leading economic power is "an example for Western leaders and governments that claim capitalism is the only alternative. We've been manipulated to believe that the first man on the Moon was the most important event of the 20th century. But no, much more important things happened, and one of the greatest events of the 20th century was the Chinese revolution."

Back in the late 1980s, when mocking the few remaining Communist believers had become a popular indoor sport in the former Soviet Union, one of my favorite gambits was to point out that Russia would have done far better economically if the Communist revolution of 1917 had never happened at all. No matter how pessimistic your assumptions about the way that a non-Communist Russia would have developed, it simply couldn't have done as badly as the Communists did.