In Fortune Makers, Michael Useem, Harbir Singh, Neng Liang, and Peter Cappelli focus on “the leaders creating China’s great companies.” They explain how these leaders “have used capitalism to pull 600 million people out of poverty and [China] is on track to soon be the largest economy in the world. It is an astonishing turn of events.”

They suggest, “Anyone who believes that this development was the inevitable result of throwing off communist economic principles should consider the experience of the former Soviet Union, which has made little economic progress post-communism despite being a resource-rich country.”

As Useem, Singh, Neng Liang, and Cappelli explain, “China has not adopted many of the practices often associated with capitalism in the West, such as a substantial role for civil society, including a free press, democratic institutions, and significant personal rights. The Communist Party remains firmly in control – even more so now, under President Xi Jinping, than before. There is no doubt that changes in the government policy and practices made the transformation possible, and the restructuring of state-owned enterprises has had an enormous effect. But the economic growth of China has been and is being led by a remarkable group of entrepreneurs and executives running private companies who were born and raised in a context of a rigidly anticapitalist system.”

Therefore, “we should be interested in China’s emerging management mindset for two major reasons: first, because China matters. Compared to its gross domestic product of 1978, China’s GNP in 2015 had grown twenty-six fold – contrasting with a less than three-fold growth over the same period in the United States…The second reason to care about the Chinese model is that it nay have much to instruct the West. Though large American companies have had a century-long head start, China’s commercial upstarts – many now counted already counted among the Global 55 – achieved scale with remarkable speed.”

There are indeed many valuable lessons to be learned from how fast-growth Chinese companies will be doing business in months and years to come.

Fortune Makers was published by Public Affairs™, an imprint of Perseus Books (March 2017).

Michael Useem is the director of the Center for Leadership and Change at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Harbir Singh is the codirector of the Mack Institute for Management Innovation at the China Europe International Business School.

Neng Liang is the director of the Case Development Center at the China Europe International Business School.

Peter Cappelli is the director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.