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 the New York Tribune.
For a decade from 1853, Marx provided, in a stream of articles, a characteristically shrewd and sharp critique of the global spread of capitalism and imperialism, and not least their impact on China.
Marx observed that through warfare England had forced the Chinese to import opium from India, and opened 'the Celestial Empire' to contact with the world. What would the consequences of this opening represent, Marx wondered, for England and Europe?
Today, Marx would have been a fascinated observer of China's One Belt One Road initiative. The central Asia corridor of the world's largest infrastructure project stretches across the Eurasian continent towards Turkey and Europe, harnessing economic development to the global ambitions of the Chinese state.
In his speech Xi Jinping recommended that 'communists should keep the habit of reading Marxism classics and learning Marxism principles'.
Marx's journalism would not today survive the Chinese censor: caustically opinionated, intently curious, castigating power without a thought for political correctness. The arch critic of liberal capitalism bathed in its press freedom.
In China the rebellious spirit is suffocated by the state. Industrial unrest and real trade union activism is suppressed. Campaigners for human and environmental rights are hounded and confined. The Chinese state fears the power of dissident words.
In early May 2018 the poet Liu Xia, under house arrest since 2010, railed against the brutal suppression of her life and work. Her husband, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, died in 2017. He had been imprisoned since 2009 as a consequence of human rights activism. The journalist and environmental activist Dai Qing has struggled to be published in her own country since speaking out in the 1990s against the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.
Unilateral state control provides the basis of the power the Chinese Communist Party projects within the nation and beyond its borders. Marx understood the unintended consequences of arbitrary power. When the people of India rose in rebellion against their British colonial masters in 1857, Marx observed that 'it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself'. So often reduced to dogma, Marx's subversive words still speak an uncomfortable truth to power.
Dr Mark Hearn is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University.