Marxism’s Next Generation

This article was originally written by: Brett Barbin

Renmin University of China (trans:
the People’s University of China) celebrated its eightieth anniversary this
October. It doesn’t have the international name recognition of Peking
University or produce some of the best engineers in the world like Tsinghua
University, but Renmin University (RUC) is associated with one particular
characteristic: its close affiliation with the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Following Mao Zedong’s strategic retreat into the northern countryside of
Shaanxi Province, he and the rest of the Communist leadership established
RUC’s precursor as the Party’s first public school in 1937 “to bring up
hundreds of thousands of revolutionary comrades to meet the needs of the
Anti-Japanese War.” And while its name changed several times during the
tumultuous period before it and the government finally settled in Beijing, the
institution always maintained a close relationship with the Party (aside from
when it was ordered to shut down during the Cultural Revolution) and continued
to produce dedicated Marxists for the management of the state.

While practiced, young
revolutionaries are the last thing the CPC wants RUC to produce now, its
nationally-renowned Marxism Studies program still lends the institution its
moniker as the “Second Party School” (following the closeby and official
Central Party School). Moreover, as President Xi Jinping wrote in his congratulatory letter to the
commemoration congregation, “Since the foundation of the school, Renmin
University has always adhered to the leadership of the party, to the guiding
position of Marxism, and to the cause of serving the party and the people, all
of which forms a distinctive school characteristic. In the fields of the
humanities and social science, it has developed a style all to its own, which
has fostered batch after batch of outstanding talent for the causes of China’s
revolution, construction, and reform.”

Nevertheless, Renmin professors who
study the functions of the Party openly doubt if “the guiding position of
Marxism” that Xi extols is even believed by the Party’s
leaders themselves. Some Chinese academics fret over just how much socialism is
contained in contemporary China’s guiding phrase of “socialism with Chinese
characteristics.” One disheartened professor even suggested to Gate reporters that if you examine the
prominent Party members of today, “You would be hard pressed to find a true
Marxist among them.” 

But the future of
Marxism in China doesn’t belong with the old guard. Whether it continues to
survive in the Middle Kingdom depends on the attitudes of those who only ever
knew Mao through photos, grew up with VPNs and an internet firewall, and
witnessed economic change so monumental in their lifetimes that it altered the
course of their country and the world. These are the Marxists of China’s
millennial generation.

Mr. Pei poses proudly in front of a sign commemorating the eightieth anniversary of Renmin University’s founding.

“The Communist
Party may be regarded as the ruling party, but how do we adapt to the modern
person or to most of the people who now identify with the concept of
liberalism?”

Pei Honghui had
clearly pondered the implications of this question to himself many times
before. The twenty-eight-year-old is a nine-year member of the CPC, and like
many of his generation, he was born at the end of Deng Xiaoping’s economic
transformation of China. His age group witnessed this increase in activity and
quality of life in every aspect of their lives that he sees as “honestly
equivalent to a change that turns the heavens and earth upside down.”

But his present
affluence has not obscured memories of his impoverished upbringing. He can
recall certain episodes from his youth like when his “parents bought a match”
and “needed to borrow one jiao [roughly a penny] in order to buy it.” Yet, now
an accomplished law student at Renmin University, the days he spends in the
library researching Hegel, Habermas, and Rawls feel like a separate life from
the one he led just two decades ago in Shandong Province. For him, despite all
its faults, the Party made his current, relative wealth a reality. His family’s
condition also greatly improved and while he notes that “there are still poor people
in China,” he qualifies this admission by explaining that “these poor in fact
are not what is traditionally meant by poor people, since a basic life has been
guaranteed to them.” However, the nation’s economic resuscitation has
undoubtedly not been uniform. Even as China’s GINI coefficient (a measurement
of economic inequality) has almost doubled since the time of his birth, Pei
insists the Party’s reforms were going to “inevitably produce a gap for a
certain period of time,” but that “this gap is a world economic problem that
cannot be solved.”

***

Mr. Ge,
twenty-nine, a human resources management PhD student, doesn’t buy this
defeatism. He thinks this gap in prosperity is mainly a problem of priorities:
“The pace of the current development is very fast, the economy is rising,
technology isn’t bad, and the military also remains strong, but is [the Party]
returning back to the lives of the people? How do you deal with the equality
issue? Because vulnerable groups still must be paid attention to. The middle
class is under immense pressure now and the social elites don’t always keep
immigrants in mind  [. . .] shouldn’t
they dwell on the issue of distribution a bit more so that we all feel the
fruits of economic development?” Ge, who grew up in the same province as Pei,
chose not to join the Party and, as a result, spends less time contemplating
the high-brow functions of the state. “Our most vital interest is the problem
of housing prices,” he made sure to tell Gate
reporters.

And Ge has reason
to be concerned. Housing prices in Beijing, and for most parts of China as
well, have reached astronomical heights at breakneck speed. Since the Party
opened the home retail market in the mid-1990s, the
price for an average home in Beijing has increased over 205 percent, and experts estimate a new, two-bedroom home in the city
would cost sixty-nine times the average per capita disposable income of a resident,
or roughly $870,000. Young people who flocked to large cities like Beijing in
search of work are finding it increasingly difficult to survive in a market
where the increase in apartment prices continues to outpace the growth of their
salaries.

“After housing
prices were pushed higher, it made the value of some of the public’s existing
real estate or fixed assets greater,” Ge recounts forlornly. “On the other
hand, those who were without these fixed assets or real estate before can’t
enter this market now and have been gradually left behind by society. At this
point, I think it’s been made clear that housing prices have instead dragged
China’s wealth inequality gap further apart.”

***

“I feel like
China’s income inequality is not particularly large, because China’s political
goals are to achieve a continuous increase in people’s living standards and
bring about a shared prosperity.”         

Mr. Hua,
twenty-six, is struggling to remember the Party mantras he dutifully recited in
high school. A security guard at Renmin University who aspires to be inside the
classroom rather than outside protecting it, his only exposure to political
philosophy or considerations of the government’s role in society is from
centrally mandated politics courses. He has yet to sit for his first college
semester of zhengzhike (“Politics Course”)—a 4–7 semester-long series of
classes required of every Chinese college student that covers Marxism’s
fundamental principles, the theories of Deng Xiaoping (originally called
socialist political economy), and the guiding principles of modern Chinese
history (originally called Mao’s main ideas)—but Hua can still dust off some
Party dogma.

“I’ll try to
answer, but I don’t know too much about this,” he wavers. “Capitalism, in
general, exploits the lowest rung of people in society. The property or
material property, the vast majority of which is owned by a small number of
capitalists, is not in the hands of the working people. So wealth is
concentrated in the hands of a few people and most laborers are working for
this money, but instead their wealth only occupies a small portion. The power
of the capitalist system is occupied by a small number of capitalists, and its
politics, such as a president’s policy decisions or a leader’s policy
decisions, often only consider the capitalists’ wishes,” he manages to retell.

Ge stands outside an entrance to an on-campus apartment building at Renmin University.

“Ordinary people
in contemporary China are so common that they definitely don’t understand
Marxism. They’re very simple,” Pei states plainly. He is likely referencing
common folk such as Hua, but if Hua were to join the Party, Pei concedes his
cursory understanding of Marxism wouldn’t be atypical among young party
members. Pei laments those individuals without faith in the larger “political
idea” who join the party not for “politics, political ideology, or personal
beliefs,” but because of professional bonuses.

“In every respect,
a party membership is an advantage with which many people use as leverage for
more advantages. What is the Communist Party? What is the pursuit of the
Communist Party? What should the Communist Party do? No one considers these
issues,” he fumes.

And Pei’s
observation about younger Party entrants may have a larger application than
just to those within the Party. “Compared to a few decades ago, I think the
footprint Marxism now leaves may not be as significant, and in the future,
there will be a more diverse set of voices,” Ge concludes about Marxism’s place
in modern society. However, to identify the present political reality, Ge feels
compelled to say that “Marxism is still the mainstream ideology of China, which
the government advocates,” even though among his generation, he can only recall
meeting one true Marxist: “these people are becoming fewer and farther between,
whereas three or four decades ago this type of thought or idea was a bit more
abundant.”

Pei, a staunch
supporter of his Party but a byproduct of the free market economic surge of his
formative years, reluctantly agrees. He believes the way the Party is currently
implementing its vestigial ideology of Marxism isn’t working. “I feel it may
have some problems,” he confesses, but that these issues arose when it was
“implemented in the form of political ideology.” What he sees now is different
from the Marxism he reads in the library. In fact, it “has been vulgarized and
misinterpreted.”

While Pei
struggles to toe the party line and also relate to China’s current
circumstances, a twenty-six-year-old Uyghur man who works for the national
government gives Marxism a more blunt diagnosis: “It doesn’t have realistic
content.”

An observer of the
world around him, Hua notes that Marxism may not be as widely respected as some
people think. “Some ordinary Chinese people don’t have the time or are
uninterested, so it has never taken root and sprouted among them. It’s probably
only kind of popular in a few CPC cadres,” he perceives on second thought.   

Hua with his OFO of the moment. OFO is one of several bike sharing companies who have become overnight household names in China’s rapidly growing economy.

With all of these
doubts about the system of thought that has united China and been the central organizing
principle for generations, Pei grows uneasy.

“Did you know that
the Chinese people don’t actually have a self- or national identity now that
can achieve a smooth and steady condition for the country,” he exclaims.
Although Hua isn’t mourning the tertiary importance Marxism now occupies in
society, he also notices the seismic moral change within his age cohort. He’s
discouraged that all relationships are now “based on personal profit, and
everyone thinks about money.” As his generation’s political interest in Marxism
withers, a flurry of Western attitudes grows over it. In order to repel these
harmful foreign influences, Pei suggests China take “40–50 years” to
“re-recognize Chinese culture and politics as its own” in order to reassure
itself, “mollify its own problems, and become as stable a country as it can
be.”

Hardly
coincidental, his proposal for national introspection sounds familiar to Xi’s
own rhetorical creation, the Chinese Dream. In many ways, the Chinese Dream
symbolizes China’s recent and rampant appropriation of Western customs. The
pursuit of wealth accumulation, unflagging self-reliance, and large-scale
consumerism have become so normalized and glorified in Chinese society that it
felt only natural to resurrect the American Dream in China. But Pei does not
mention these uncomfortable origins in his talking points. To him, the Chinese
Dream simply embodies “the prosperity of our nation.” He theorizes that Xi gave
it “a very commonplace formulation,” which does “not deal with a number of
theories” so that it could be universally understood and accepted. A suitably
amorphous ideology for a politically disengaged young adult class.

“The Chinese Dream
more likely originated from the reality of modern China, which seems to have
features of both capitalism and Marxism. There are some capitalist aspects of
things in the market economy, and there are some pieces of Marxism as well,” Ge
points out. As a hybrid of both systems, the Chinese Dream dodges controversy.
Unlike Marxism, it isn’t associated with all too recent mass famines, and
unlike capitalism, it isn’t an imported “exploitative” product.

“It’s just a
series of pursuits towards future development after we’ve already begun to use
all of our efforts to rejuvenate the country,” Ms. Dong, a twenty-four-year-old
law student, states happily.

And as economic
optimism and a tolerant, if not wholehearted, embrace of the free market has
energized young Chinese people, Western ideals seem to have reached her
generation as well.

“Theoretically,
it’s certainly correct that every person should have the right to protest,” Pei
affirms.

“I hope [the
Chinese government] is able to be a kind of coaching or service-focused
government that does good things. It shouldn’t think that it needs to take care
of everything. Let ordinary people play their own role,” Ge imagines of his
ideal government.

“China should see
freedom as somewhat more important [than security,]” Hua decides.

A statue of Wu Yuzhang, a longtime Communist revolutionary and 17-year RUC President, shrouded behind the campus’s main conference hall, where American economists John Nash and Joseph Stiglitz once received honorary doctorate degrees.

Yet, while the
sentiments shared above seem markedly different from what an outsider would
expect in a Marxist country, many of these personal opinions borrow heavily
from the stated, current priorities of the Party. Preoccupied with the demands
of their prosperous economy, young people have little time to dwell on the
functions of the Party or the role of Marxism in China. As a result of this
apathy, the mandatory seven-semester “Politics Course” that many of these
college or graduate students take continues to insert itself into their
political beliefs and has effectively blurred the line between their personal
opinions, Party explanations, and Party rhetoric.

As one may have
guessed by the opening assumption of “theoretically,” Pei goes on to qualify
his viewpoint by suggesting “someone must be rational” and possess “all of the
information” on the topic they wish to protest in order to deserve this
“right.” He then presumes that everyone will naturally “think they’re rational”
before they protest, and that this is especially true in China due to the
tumultuous democratic transition at the end of the Qing Dynasty when “the
people’s mood became more intense and their opinions became biased.”
Ultimately, he concludes it is best for the Party to make the decision for the
people and “consider in what kind of condition we will allow protests” with a
hope of one day allowing some to “be organized in a government-led fashion.”

Although not a
member of the Party himself, Ge’s hope for a government that lets “ordinary
people play their own role” is a variation on a popular slogan in Party
rhetoric primarily used to explain how the Party leaders deliver instructions
to the people, and certainly does not imply advocacy for a more devolved
political system. As Hua explained when he claimed China already has a
democratic system, “The leader fully considers everyone’s views, and we should
all remember to express our needs using positive speech. Finally, he assembles
all the opinions together. Then, the main Central leaders decide how to
implement them, and it’s pushed to the masses to adopt and carry forward.”
Within this framework, Ge wants more emphasis on the “carry forward” step.
Nevertheless, regardless of how far capitalism spreads in China, if he and his
generation can only use the Party’s set phrases to describe their personal
beliefs, the Party’s hold over political thought has only grown stronger.

Lastly, Hua’s
advocacy for greater freedom appears to be the most permissive of Western
values, but his words should read more like shallow encouragement than a
heartfelt prescription. Instead, the timeworn Chinese concept of security and
stability in one’s place in society has resonated with the young generation.
“If people are not safe, and they are only free, then this cannot work. If they
are only safe and not free, then society will be inflexible and
lethargic,” Hua continues. By first stating that neither absolute is
ideal, Hua can logically conclude that each term carries equivalent
implications and any ratio between the two would be roughly the same. And when
freedom and security receive equal theoretical importance, the conservative
tendency for stability typically prevails. On this issue, Hua almost precisely
parroted one of the most common rhetorical ploys of the Party.

“If there is no
security, then there is no freedom,” Ms. Fan, a twenty-year-old management
major, deduces.

“If you don’t have
security, then, as a matter of fact, you still won’t have freedom,” Ge seconds.

“If you are in an
unsafe situation, you may lose things such as your property or your life. In
this case, you may be free, but if you are deprived of your life, then you
certainly won’t have any freedom,” Ms. Xu, a twenty-year-old graphic design
major, declares assuredly.

Chinese young
people are more than willing to accept the premise that stability and security
are necessities for freedom. Whether this is their honest opinion or not, the
Party has managed to exploit this generational risk-averse inclination with
great success, increasing roadside investigations, eliminating VPNs, and kidnapping book publishers with little public
reaction.