Marxism-Leninism dies an uncaring death in China

I've been remiss in my China-related blogging duties. The fact of the matter is I don't have the time to blog everything that catches my eye -- between work, studies, and family duties, and an impending move, I'm lucky if I can devote more than three hours per week to blogging. Lately, I've been devoting that time to my Computerworld and I Lamont blogs.

However, in the past few days, there have been a couple of mainstream media articles about China that piqued my interest. The first item is from the Los Angeles Times, and discusses the near complete failure of the regime in Beijing to teach Marxist-Leninist thought in China. Even though the Chinese Communist Party holds the reins of power, and forces millions to attend classes on Marxism-Leninism, no one cares. And it's not just students -- even some cadre intellectuals have given up:

Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian who is the first Westerner in the modern era to teach politics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China's most elite educational institution, wrote in the spring issue of Dissent magazine of his surprise at how little Marxism is actually discussed in China, even among Communist Party intellectuals.

"The main reason Chinese officials and scholars do not talk about communism is that hardly anybody really believes that Marxism should provide guidelines for thinking about China's political future," he wrote. "The ideology has been so discredited by its misuses that it has lost almost all legitimacy in society. To the extent there's a need for a moral foundation for political rule in China, it almost certainly won't
come from Karl Marx."

I found the Dissent article to read more about what Bell had to say. His thesis did not dwell so much on the rise of capitalism, but rather the increasing role of religion and Chinese social philosophy:

In China, the moral vacuum is being filled by Christian sects, Falun Gong, and extreme forms of nationalism. As Peter Hays Gries has noted, many Chinese intellectuals call on the state to deal with extreme forms of nationalism (rather than viewing the state itself as part of the problem). But the government considers that such alternatives threaten the hard-won peace and stability that underpins China's development, so it has encouraged the revival of China's most venerable political tradition, Confucianism.

See also:

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• Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and
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• Five
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