Socialist democracy is indeed a hybrid, Bruce. Unfettered capitalism is what the world pretty much had until socialist ideas gained acceptance in the west and workable hybrid forms were established (from the thirties to the fifties) that created economies that actually worked for the majority of the people. The middle class as we understand it today, was not a concept until the fifties.

As Einhard points out, I'm not talking about big S Socialism. Its idea of a permanent battle between the upper and lower classes was not intended to give rise to large middle class, but to give control to the lower class. That may have looked like a reasonable alternative at the end of the nineteenth century, when it seemed that big C Capitalism could indefinitely keep the small upper classes on top at the expense of the majority, even in democracies. The modern western solution is to diffuse the (still very real) antagonism between low and upper classes by creating a bell curve with most people in the middle and sufficient mobility to keep everyone interested in playing along.

It is important to keep in mind that all these factors - wealth, socialism and democracy - play a role in creating the kind of societies that the west now enjoys. China and India are experiments in recreating our success story on a much, much larger scale (each of these countries have more people than in the EU and US combined, and when we went through this evolution, the populations were smaller and more homogenous still). It should be obvious that this isn't straightforward. In particular, the relative success of China and India shows that democracy isn't necessarily the most important part of creating a largely peaceful and prosperous country. China's middle class has exploded from a small minority to almost two thirds of the population in less than two decades, without even a glint of democracy. Finally, to come back to the article, I expect that China will eventually become more democratic, but I think that that will not necessarily lead to a more stable or a more peaceful country.