of strategic industries, government sponsorship of trade and technology transfers, and public spending. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc and centrally planned economies in 1989 provided renewed impetus for China to further reform its economy through different policies to avoid a similar fate. China also wanted to avoid the Russian ad-hoc experiments with market capitalism under Boris Yeltsin resulting in the rise of powerful oligarchs, corruption, and the loss of state revenue which exacerbated economic disparity. Cultural Revolution contributes to China's economic growth in long run. According to Mancur Olson, Cultural Revolution attacked the very administrators and managers on which Chinese economy depended, and the immediate result was instability and administrative chaos in short run. A longer-run result was that there were not nearly as many well-entrenched interest groups as in the Soviet Union and the European communist states, so when Deng Xiaoping and the other pragmatists take power, there were few interest groups whose lobbying could undermine Deng's market-oriented reforms, because the Cultural Revolution had destroyed the narrowly entrenched interests with a stake in the status quo. Comparison to other developing economies China's transition from a planned economy to a socialist market economy has often been compared with economies in Eastern Europe that are undergoing a similar transition. China's performance has been praised for avoiding the major shocks and inflation that plagued the Eastern Bloc. The Eastern bloc economies saw declines of 13% to 65% in GDP at the beginning of reforms, while Chinese growth has been very strong since the beginning of reform. China also managed to avoid the hyperinflation of 200 to 1,000% that Eastern Europe experienced. This success is attributed to the gradualist and decentralized approach of the Chinese government, which allowed market institutions to develop to the point where they could replace state planning. This contrasts with the "big bang" approach of Eastern Europe, where the state-owned sector was rapidly privatized with employee buyouts, but retained much of the earlier, inefficient management. Other factors thought to account for the differences are the greater urbanization of the CIS economies and differences in social welfare and other institutions. Another argument is that, in the Eastern European economies, political change is sometimes seen to have made gradualist reforms impossible, so the shocks and inflation were unavoidable. China's economic growth has been compared with other developing countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, and India. GDP growth in China outstrips all