China’s Xi hails Karl Marx’s ‘brilliant light of truth’

Karl Marx’s theory “still shines with the brilliant light of truth”, China’s president Xi Jinping told Communist Party faithful in the Great Hall of the People in a speech to mark the 200th anniversary of the German philosopher’s birth.

“Today, we hold this grand gathering with great veneration to mark the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, to remember his great character and historic deeds and to review his noble spirit and brilliant thoughts,” said Mr Xi, who is general secretary of the ruling Communist Party.

Mr Xi hailed Marx as the “teacher of revolution for the proletariat and working people all over the world, the main founder of Marxism, creator of Marxist parties, pathfinder for international communism and the greatest thinker of modern times.”

Marxist theories are formally part of the ruling party’s doctrine. China’s powerful economic growth in recent decades and growing gap between rich and poor are more in line with capitalist mores, but under Mr Xi, the world’s second largest economy has taken a more doctrinaire approach to “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

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The Chinese leader has stressed Marxist thinking as a key factor in realising his “Chinese Dream” of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

There are chat shows with theoretical musings looking at Marx’s legacy, cartoons in newspapers and the Communist Party has celebrated Marx’s bicentennial with exhibitions and speeches around the country.

Sun Yat-sen University in the southern city of Guangzhou is holding a major exhibition of manuscripts by Marx and Friedrich Engels, including copies of Das Kapital in multiple languages and a first-edition copy of the 1848 classic text, The Communist Manifesto.

The government’s Central Compilation and Translation Bureau has published an 18-book series based on Marxist classics to mark the anniversary.

For the past three decades, the bureau has been translating and compiling the second edition of the 70-volume Complete Works by Marx and Engels. To date, 28 volumes have been published but to complete the second edition will take another 20 years at least.

“We are speakers for the great men. We should treat each and every word with the utmost prudence,” Gu Jinping, former deputy head of the bureau, told local media.

“For example, to finish a book of 600,000 Chinese characters, it would require about 20 people for two to three years,” Mr Gu said, holding one volume of the second edition of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels.

The first edition of the Complete Works was translated in the 1950s, after the communist revolution in 1949. A scarcity of German speakers meant the works were initially translated from Russian.