CHINA:China has launched a high-profile counter-attack against tentative calls for democratic reform and reiterated the country's commitment to good, old-fashioned Marxist values.
Recent weeks have seen influential cadres urge more democracy in the Communist Party, which controls China with an iron grip.
But "socialism with Chinese characteristics", which is effectively a pragmatic mishmash of capitalist imperatives and bespoke Leninist control structures, all designed to keep the party in control, is very much the dominant way of thinking.
A strident article in the party mouthpiece, the People's Daily, condemned "democratic socialism", saying China should not copy foreign systems. Separately, but far from coincidentally, senior academics said the study of Marxist theory is undergoing a revival.
The timing of the piece, which reaffirms the importance of Marxism-Leninism, is no accident, given that a party congress later this year is set to give party general secretary Hu Jintao five more years at the helm.
Mr Hu's comments come after meeting German president Horst Köhler, who revealed that, during their briefing, Mr Hu had admitted to "mistakes and problems" with China's human rights record, a very unusual admission for a Chinese head of state.
In February's edition of the mildly reformist monthly party magazine China Across the Ages (Yanhuang Chunqiu) the veteran Xie Tao (85) described 20th-century history as a contest between capitalism, communism and Swedish-style democratic socialism, with its stress on equality and political rights.
The debate is significant because it highlights the dichotomy between the burgeoning Chinese economy, and growing individual freedoms in China, and the need for the Communist Party to use the language of socialism to help underscore the party's right to rule.
In what counts as fighting talk, Mr Xie said the democratic socialist model had won, outlasting communism and transforming capitalism.
Moreover, he urged China to renew itself through democratic reform.
The response from the People's Daily has been fairly straightforward.
"Democratic socialism does not suit China's national conditions," ran one editorial in the newspaper, which is the party's main outlet.
"The democratic socialist road cannot save China, and only socialism with Chinese characteristics can rejuvenate China," the leader ran, in what is a clear reference to the country's one-party rule.
Another editorial in the People's Daily said democratic socialism was actually a capitalist tool. The virtues of western welfare states, such as social safety nets, "can be appropriately consulted and drawn on", it said.
Meanwhile, the Chinese media had numerous reports of how the study of Marxism was undergoing a revival.
"Other than basic philosophical research, the application of Marxism in China is the focus of our study," said Wu Enyuan, deputy president of the Marxism Institute with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which was set up at the end of 2005.
He said disastrous economic policies such as The Great Leap Forward (1958-1959) which saw millions of Chinese die of starvation, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which destroyed the country's intelligentsia, were a sign of "misunderstanding and deviation of the basic theories of Marxism".