It is grimly ironic that Karl Marx has been mobilised to justify the Chinese Communist Party's embrace of state-directed capitalism.
On the bicentenary of the communist prophet's birth on 5 May 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that the Communist Party 'has combined the fundamental principles of Marxism with the reality of China's reform and opening up, and the nation who stood up has grown rich'.
China's economic system bears no resemblance to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism advocated in The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848.
Embracing what Marx described as 'a fetish of commodities' — including the worship of the Barbie Doll, at the world's largest store dedicated to the plastic princess in Shanghai — has delivered astonishing economic growth and has lifted millions of Chinese out of poverty, as Richard McGregor acknowledged in The Party, a study of the world's most powerful political machine.
Declaring that a desire to be rich is good has also yoked the Chinese Communist Party to the fortunes of the economy.
From the inauguration of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in 1980, the Communist Party has been a captive to capitalism. As Richard McGregor observes, 'the Party's legitimacy' in the eyes of the Chinese people depends on maintaining the pillar of strong economic growth.
Marxist mythology provides an ideological veneer for the Communist Party's monopoly of power. The China Daily reported that Xi hailed Marx 'as a mentor for the revolution of all the working people ... Marx strived his entire life for the revolution of mankind, the pursuit of truth and the building of a new world.'
"The contrary dissident would find no refuge in the stultified, bureaucratic conformity of Beijing, a political culture as smoothed of dissent as the tightly policed space of Tiananmen Square."
Xi Jinping would have the world believe that China is Marx's spiritual home. But Marx would find no place in modern China. He would be as threatened with imprisonment and suppressed into silence as he was in Cologne, Paris and Brussels before he found refuge in the liberal tolerance of Victorian London in 1849.
The contrary dissident would find no refuge in the stultified, bureaucratic conformity of Beijing, a political culture as smoothed of dissent as the tightly policed space of Tiananmen Square.
Marx might at least have felt awestruck under the stunning towers of Shanghai's free trade zone. The rapacious global spread of capitalism was a phenomenon that he sought to explain to the readers of