Though the government warns that China's state-owned companies must prepare for global competition, most sectors of the economy remain stuck in their socialist past.

Both managers and workers are fed up with platitudes about market economics and about the failures of the socialist past.

The discontinuity between China's "socialist" past and "capitalist" present perplexes Pomfret.

But today's youth - those born in the 1980's - never experienced either the shortages or the psychological constraints of the country's socialist, Soviet-oriented past, he said.

Tanzania has only recently opened up to foreign investors, having slowly turned its back on its socialist past.

Only weeks after Smith died (in the same month as Miliband) the party would start burying any trace of its socialist past.

But the country has now moved away from its socialist past and begun an aggressive program to privatize.

The company had to convince states to waive laws, born of India's protectionist socialist past, that require farmers to sell their produce to government markets.

A legacy of Israel's socialist past, the handouts remain universal, paid out no matter how big the family or how rich.

But in China, still in the throes of a wrenching transition from its socialist past, many factories keep producing goods even when demand is falling.