Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale, examines China and Vietnam as the most successful cases of capitalist authoritarianism to emerge from the post-communist era. Part of his DeVane Lecture series course Power and Politics in Today's World, taught at Yale in fall 2019, this session traces the causal drivers of growth in both countries and revisits China's reform era leading up to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Shapiro walks through the debate over whether political or economic liberalization should come first, using China and Vietnam as test cases against classical modernization theory, which predicted that economic growth would eventually produce democratization. He closes by weighing what these cases mean for expectations about China's political future. The lecture runs 72 minutes and assumes some familiarity with the course's broader argument about the retreat from post-Cold War optimism.