Sino File | Would Karl Marx recognise China’s new communism?
Since the 1970s, capitalist reforms have reshaped the nation, and now President Xi Jinping seems to be turning another philosophical corner, advancing a communist-capitalist hybrid to suit his own agenda
Back home, however, he is leading a campaign to indoctrinate the nation with ideologies of Marxism, Leninism and Mao – communist greats who advocated the elimination of capitalism.
As the world’s last major communist-ruled nation, China claims to uphold the ruling philosophy of Marxism and its various mutations, such as Leninism and Maoism. And now Xi’s thought is also enshrined as another such mutation.
In practice, China has long abandoned Karl Marx’s basic principles, after it began market reforms in the late 1970s that turned the once Stalinist backwater into the world’s second-largest economy.
Today China bears many of the hallmarks of a capitalist society, but a kind of party-led capitalism with a state-regulated market. It is now a marketplace dominated by tycoons and state monopolies; corruption is systemic, and inequality prevails. In this state-directed capitalism, wealth inequality is rampant, Dickensian exploitation is not uncommon, and the number of billionaires is even greater in China than the United States, the world’s largest economy. And this is exactly the kind of the political-economic system Karl Marx and his German philosopher Friedrich Engels called the world to overthrow in their famous 1848 Communist Manifesto.
When we say ‘new order’ of the Chinese Communist Party, what exactly are we talking about?
