Bangkok  - When the Communist system collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 20 years ago, many observers hoped for a similar domino effect in Asia. They were disappointed. Its four Communist regimes have not only survived, some have thrived since 1989.

The governments of China, Vietnam, North Korea and Laos have kept their firm hold on power using strategies that have varied from free market reforms to iron fists.

Those policies have turned China and Vietnam into export powerhouses, with China advancing to the world's third-largest economy, and well on its way to becoming the second largest. North Korea and Laos, meanwhile, have turned inward and are some of the poorest countries of the world.

CHINA

China faced a barrage of criticism and calls for reform from the West in 1989 after its deadly crackdown on democracy protests around Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

But the rapid growth in its global economic and diplomatic power over the past 20 years has gradually led to a more pragmatic approach from most nations. Concerns over China's human rights record rarely make the agenda when foreign dignitaries come to visit.

Shen Dingli, an international relations specialist at Fudan University in Shanghai, argues that Western governments have not decreased their emphasis on human rights, but have become more willing to conduct dialogue with China on its own terms and have accepted that the rights to food and security in the developing country are as important as the right to free speech.

China's economic power has also helped. Since 1989, it has seen unprecedented growth, fuelled by trade and investment from Western nations eager to take advantage of its cheap labour and the potential for hundreds of millions of new consumers among its 1.3 billion people.

Domestically, the government has cemented its rule by allowing greater social freedoms, but maintaining an enormous secretive security apparatus to ensure that no organized groups can mount any political challenge to the party.

Some observers said they believe Chinese leaders adapted their strategies for the party's survival after analyzing the collapse of former Communist allies in the Soviet Bloc.

In response, the party launched patriotic education campaigns and a "consumer revolution" in the 1990s to combat economic grievances, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a history professor at the University of California at Irvine, wrote last month in the US magazine Foreign Policy.

VIETNAM

In Vietnam, free market reforms started earlier than the Soviet Union's perestroika reforms.

After Communist North Vietnam conquered the South in 1975, Hanoi's attempt to institute Soviet-style collective farming was a disaster and brought near-famine conditions.

The government backtracked and, as early as 1981, began allowing farmers to sell their surplus harvests. By 1989, Vietnam had turned from a rice importer into one of the world's largest rice exporters. Soon the reforms, called Doi Moi, spread to small businesses.

While the collapse of the Soviet Bloc spurred Vietnam along an economic path it was already following, it, and the cautionary example of the Tiananmen crackdown in China, reinforced the Vietnamese Communist Party's determination to afford no openings for alternative political organizations.

Some reforms came in the 1990s, allowing in foreign media and more tolerance for religious worship. But, at the same time, the constitution was rewritten to make the Communist Party the sole legal political party. Nonetheless, free market policies remained in place, the only way for the government to deliver the economic growth needed to keep it in power.

NORTH KOREA

North Korea's ruling Korean Workers Party has remained in the driver's seat by implementing an opposite strategy. It has isolated itself from the rest of the world and retains total control of the economy, at the cost of widespread poverty and famine.

It allows no opposition, and its leader, Kim Jong Il, has strengthened his regime through "songun," or a military-first policy, which has helped North Korea's military become the fifth largest in the world.

LAOS

Laos is a one-party state, and, until very recently, even domestic non-governmental organizations were not allowed for fear they might form a political base for dissent.

Over the past 33 years of Communist rule, there have been remarkably few overt demonstrations against the government, an accomplishment that some observers attribute to the apolitical tendancies of the average Lao and others to the regime's success in securing aid from abroad.

Foreign aid accounts for 50 per cent of the government's budget, effectively financing the Communist Party's monopoly of power.

Such aid - along with an abundance of hydropower, timber and minerals - has allowed the Lao economy to sustain respectable growth, averaging 7 per cent in recent years and likely to hit 5 per cent in 2009, even as the rest of the world reels from recession. (dpa)