That's all not in small part because the best and brightest people of the generation killed each other in a civil war.

With all Jiang Zemin's flaws, his best move was to "politically castrate" the party, and distance intra-party affairs from state governance. This is what made the two decades of progress possible: civil servants without little red books instead of brains.

In the current CCPs internal lingo, there is a term "Marxist ghosts" that was around since Jiang first took reign. The party has been long purging Marxist hardliners, but so far, have not came to full realisation why they have to do so other than "because they screwed up"