The importance of socialism in China

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One of the elements of modern Chinese thinking that is underestimated is the continuing importance of thought from the traditions of Marxism-Leninism and also, of course, Maoism, Chairman Mao’s own adaptation of that thinking. There’s a quite widely held narrative that after 1978 – when the Cultural Revolution ended, Deng Xiaoping opened China up to the world and China essentially started becoming the workshop of the world – communism was heaved out of the way to make way for capitalism as an alternative. And I think that that actually is pretty misleading.

It’s much more effective to understand that, while China has obviously become a country that has used capitalism in an extremely effective way, from the point of view of China’s leaders and the wider society, this is very much one of the stages in the ultimate development of socialism. That end goal has not in any way been lost or downgraded.

Marxist-Leninist language in politics

You can see that if you look at what’s happening in terms of the language around politics in China today. It has many elements; it has an internationalist and quite Confucian element that looks outward, so China talks about common destiny and harmony and such ideas, particularly in forums such as the United Nations. What it doesn’t tend to do internationally but does very openly at home, and looking at the politics of China domestically one can see this, is to use language that is drawn very much from the Marxist-Leninist tradition.

If you look at theoretical journals published by the Communist Party training schools, they talk a great deal about ideas like struggle and ideas like contradictions. And these terms, which sound a little bit jargonistic unless you spend a lot of time with Marxist theory, are actually a direct inheritance of that tradition from the German philosopher Hegel in the 18th century, Karl Marx in the 19th century and the many who adapted their thinking in the 20th century – notably Lenin, who was also very keen on the idea of the State creating a kind of leadership cadre which would exercise often deeply violent power, terror and other methods to try and get to that end goal of socialism. All of these ideas are very visible in terms of the way that China talks about its politics internally today.

Putting socialism into practice

This is where the vehicle becomes important. And the vehicle, of course, is the Chinese Communist Party. One of the things that outside observers often find difficult to grapple with is this: because we use that term “party”, sometimes there’s a slightly careless equivalence made between that and say, the British Conservative Party, or the American Republican Party, or even the old Soviet Communist Party. But it has to be understood that the Chinese Communist Party’s organisational success – and organisationally, it has been pretty successful – has come from the ability to honeycomb its power through all levels of society and all institutions.

In other words, the Chinese Communist Party is not just a small group of people in a politburo sitting in a very fancy building in Beijing, although, of course, at the top, that’s exactly what it is. It’s also a huge, intricate network of men and women all across the country who are running businesses, who are running local welfare organisations, who are in a system where joining the party and thereby taking tests on things like Marxist-Leninist theory are part of the way in which you shape your mindset so that you can move to the top.

And it moves with the times. One of the phenomena that has achieved a certain amount of interest in the West, but is obviously very closely observed in China, is the use of apps on your phone to study and revise the socialist thought of the Communist Party. You get tested on it and get through from stage to stage. So the fact that China has become this hugely technologically enabled, very advanced economy has existed absolutely in tandem with China’s continuation of itself as a Marxist-Leninist State, not despite it, as some outside observers sometimes want to argue.

A Marxist-Leninist worldview

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The ultimate goal of the Chinese Communist Party and its use of Marxist-Leninist thinking is something that is still very much up for debate within China itself. But there are certain directions of travel that you can see. One is that some of these ideas need not only to shape China’s domestic interests but also can be used to help shape an idea of how the world might be.

Marxism-Leninism is important, but it’s not the only system of thinking that operates in China. We also have the tradition of Chinese Confucian thought, which stresses ideas of harmony and cooperation as well as a very intense engagement with the international system, of which China has been a more central member since it re-entered the United Nations in 1971.

The goal of the Chinese Communist Party

In that context, it’s worth understanding that the Marxist-Leninist framework, which all Chinese elites and leaders absolutely have, pushes forward the idea that confrontation and contradiction in world politics is inevitable. In other words, you think about something like the US-China conflict over everything from trade to technology in the present day. This fits into the Chinese model of how worlds and societies operate. In that sense, the Marxist-Leninist model is quite comfortable. It’s quite meaningful when explaining that sort of antagonism between the two sides.

The ultimate goal, I think, would be the combination of China as a stable but fiercely socialist society: one in which those collective values, democratic dictatorship – more dictatorship than democratic, I have to say, in liberal understandings of China – operate in the context of a world which is much more willing to accept that idea of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic. It’s the concept that sometimes you have to have these ideas coming up against each other and even conflicting before you get to some sort of resolution, what classic Marxist theory would call “synthesis”.

Do Marxist-Leninist ideas resonate with people?

Many individual Chinese – and you can see their views by looking, for instance, on Chinese social media – can often be quite critical or even mocking of individual factors that shape particular strands of Chinese thinking. If university students have to take compulsory courses in Marxist-Leninist thought, the reaction you’ll get from many students is, those classes are so boring. We basically learn what we have to fill in the exam, then forget about it afterwards; this isn’t really important at all.

And other times they’ll say, why do we have to learn so much history? We want to get on with the future, not the past. But if you drill down further into some of those attitudes, you’ll find that although the specifics are often regarded with a slightly critical air, the wider mindsets that they embody do actually prove quite effective in terms of creating a set of strands that combine together to shape China’s idea of itself as a nation-state and what it is.

If you think about the Marxist-Leninist tradition and the intricacies of theory in journals like Qiushi, which is a major Chinese Communist Party theoretical journal, then on the one hand, everyday people working in offices and on the street are not going to spend much time thinking about those sorts of ideas. But the basic ideas that are put forward – that China is in a sort of struggle in the world, that in some ways there are contradictions within society that have to be resolved – in that broader sense, I think people would find that quite a convincing view of the world. This might not be true in quite the same way, to take a random example, in a country like Sweden, which has a very different background or social makeup.

Marxism-Leninism and Confucianism

Life has been a struggle for many people in China for many decades. Therefore, a theoretical model that actually explains antagonism and struggle is a rather useful one to put forward. But when pressed, I think people will also say that the Confucian tradition continues to be really important in China. That includes the devotion to care for older people in society, including one’s parents, or the need to behave in a way that involves some sort of reciprocal good behaviour.

One of the things that Chinese people tend to mourn about their own society is that as it has become richer, it has also become less trusting, and people are less willing to act on good faith with each other. Part of the enthusiasm to look back not at Marxism-Leninism but at Confucian thinking is an attempt to try and build up some sort of resilience in that area of mutual trust in a different sphere of the wider sociological makeup. It’s worth noting that many of these ideas that shape modern China, certainly including Marxism-Leninism, are very important as a sort of background, as a sort of framework, if not necessarily in the specifics. But they exist as part of a matrix of thinking, which includes all sorts of other influences as well.

What the future holds

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One certainty is that China will have to change within the next decade because its demographics are changing very strongly. That’s just a statistical and sociological reality. Because of the one-child policy – most Chinese were only allowed to have one child between the 1970s and the 2000s – China’s demographics will inevitably change. By the year 2029, there will be five million fewer Chinese every year because the population will start shrinking, having grown for years and years. It’ll be more like what you see in places like Japan or South Korea.

It’s also a fair prediction to say that China will continue at least for the next period to be a technological innovator. It has started to be that way within the last half-decade to decade, and I don’t see any reason why overall that shouldn’t continue. I think it’s also fair to say that whatever form of government China has in the next few years, it is likely to be something that the Chinese Communist Party is in charge of. I do not see the Party and the way that it’s honeycombed throughout society being dislodged in the way that you might have seen in the old Soviet Union in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The challenge of contradictory goals

But having said all that, lots of things are still open for change. One is the question of whether or not China can continue on its current trajectory with the level of top-down authoritarian political control that it has. In a sense, China wants contradictory goals: both huge levels of control at home but actually also to be engaged with the world.

China still wants to send its young people to the West, to America or Britain or Australia, to study and to learn English and then bring those skills back. It wants to have that wider economic and technological footprint around the world, whether it’s bringing 5G to sub-Saharan Africa or creating economic networks around it in the East Asian region. All of these things are very difficult to maintain over a long period with a system that at home clamps down very heavily on people being able to gather free information transparently and gain free choices.

Discover more about

China and socialism

Mitter, R. (2005). A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World. Oxford University Press.

Mitter, R. (2014). Mao Zedong and Charismatic Maoism. In R. Guha (Ed.), Makers of Modern Asia (pp. 93–116). Harvard University Press.

Mitter, R. (2019). Identities and Alliances: China’s Place in the World after Pearl Harbor, 1941–1945. In B. Bailey, & D. Farber (Eds.), Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History (pp. 102–120). University Press of Kansas.

What shaped modern China