JLoZeppeli:
China's Imperial rule was hardly centralized. Mandarins held so much power that the Emperor had to call them in on an annual basis just to remind them he was in charge, and they didn't always remember that when they got back home.
This decentralized, bureaucratic system kept itself mostly intact during the so-called "police state" change in Chinese politics. In fact, during Mao's rule, the ancient independent farm system existed mostly intact in many rural localities until well into Deng's reforms.
The modern Chinese state is still based on this bureaucracy for the most part, and the local politicians of the CCP still hold a lot of power in their locales, especially the ones far from Beijing. In fact, there is a power struggle now between Beijing and the lower-tier locals about property laws, rights, allocations, and such.
Adapting relatively free-form capitalistic practice was relatively easy for China because it has had traditions of powerful mercantile interests in the past, so all it had to do was relax restrictions on those interests and they could resurface with all the trading practices and social infrastructure they had maintained all these years.
We like to think of these revolutions as drastic changes introduced by outside forces, but it seems to me that in each instance, it was merely a change triggered by coincident events, but pushed forward by large inertias of social forces. In some arenas, the changes were largely nominal in nature.
The Magna Carta had history propelling it forward, and it, in turn, created a cascade of events that slowly changed the people into a body that could be ready for things like representation.
The Magna Carta could not have been envisioned by the Aborigines of Australia. They had no need of it, and their ongoing social mores would have made much of it nonsensical.
