So what is this Leninism of which you speak?
Marxism, as we know, is an economic ideology, and it’s all about ultimately creating an egalitarian or equal society through an equal distribution of goods, but to be achieved through a process of dialectical change.
A Leninist party is designed to accelerate the natural historical forces of change through the active intervention of a vanguard party, which accelerates the course of history through its own violent actions. Therefore, it’s a history accelerator. That’s how they see it.
Of course, when applied to China’s own circumstances, this Leninism essentially has all the hallmarks of Stalin’s party. It’s like Stalinism frozen in time. It is an unrelenting discipline anchored in absolute loyalty to the leader himself, and this is rehearsed time and time and time again in the party’s internal ideological discourse and reflected in what the party does in practice.
We talked a bit about how Xi’s father was purged. He also becomes, at certain times, unpurged.
Mao dies, Deng Xiaoping takes over. And I think this gets into something worth talking about. You described it as a bit like the Stalinist party “frozen in time.” But then, because of its fealty to the leader, it is also able to make quite radical changes.
So how does the Communist Party in China — and beyond that, China itself — change after Mao?
It’s gone through, I think, two big changes. The first reaction under Deng Xiaoping, who effectively replaced Mao in ’78, was called the great period of reform and opening. “Reform” meant, basically, introducing market disciplines into the economy rather than state planning, and “opening” meant in order to grow, we need to open to the outside world.
