In 2025, Vladimir Popov published the book “The Chinese Model: Why China Once Lagged behind the West and Is Now Surpassing It”. The author deciphers the policies of the Chinese leadership that enabled the country to leap from the Third World into the First. The structured approach of the author gives a six-stage model of China’s geopolitical success, which removes the veil of mystery from the country’s astonishing achievements-a country that not long ago was a cluster of global poverty-and reveals the specific management decisions which made this success possible and may serve as a model for emulation. The six stages of China’s success model are: 1) Political and social stability (strong central authority, socialist principles, and the prevention of excessive inequality); 2) Investment activity (the expropriation of profits and windfall revenues into the budget and centralized investment); 3) Investment efficiency (the introduction of market relations and the stimulation of technological progress); 4) Economic sovereignty (import substitution and protectionism to build domestic industries); 5) International competitiveness (export-oriented production); 6) The adaptability of policies and institutions (the adjustment of state and market institutions to current circumstances and conditions). The final step of the Chinese success model is based on China’s political tradition, which aligns individual values with collective ones. To illustrate this process, the article proposes a simple formal model of the dialectic between the individual and the collective, where a transfer between individual rights and public good is possible. In such a model, the government sometimes switches on a new public good (or several at once) by switching off certain individual rights (or several at once). However, such a purely endogenous model of the Chinese miracle, where the country owes its success solely to itself, appears incomplete. Therefore, it is supplemented by the consideration of external factors, including the historical memory of the political elites; the elites’ historical awareness of the demographic factor; the absence of dogmatic thinking among the elites; and the elites’ mastery of geopolitical conditions. The article also discusses why the USSR and Russia failed to realize the Chinese model of success, even though they were, in many cases, pioneers in implementing similar governance principles.