Marxism and the Xi-Putin Link
To Xi Jinping, a Russian victory over Ukraine would vindicate the Marxist theory of history.
By Leon Aron
July 31, 2024 5:33 pm ET
China is Russia’s lifeline. It supplies almost all key imports for the Russian war machine: microelectronics for missiles, tanks and aircraft; machine tools for ammunition production; and nitrocellulose, a critical explosive ingredient for artillery shells. A Group of Seven communiqué in June identified Chinese support as indispensable to Russian military aims, and leaders at last month’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Washington labeled China the “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Western nations must put to rest the pipe dream of enlisting Xi Jinping’s China to restrain Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mr. Xi won’t seek to end the Ukraine war with “one phone call,” as Finnish President Alexander Stubb has suggested. That’s because Mr. Xi’s motive for supporting Mr. Putin’s war is bound up with passionate ideological conviction. Namely, Mr. Xi is a fervent Marxist.
No Chinese Communist Party general secretary since Mao has pledged allegiance to Marxist doctrine with such ardor. For Mr. Xi, China’s “rejuvenation,” the legitimizing leitmotif of his rule, has been inseparable from rekindling devotion to Marx’s teachings. Less than two months into his tenure as general secretary, Mr. Xi enjoined the party’s Central Committee to “keep up with the living soul of Marxism.” Communism, he said, is the party’s “highest ideal and its ultimate goal.” Mr. Xi has since called Marx the “greatest thinker in human history” and declared that his teachings retain their “vigor and vitality” and remain the party’s “guiding theory.”
To celebrate Marx’s 200th birthday in 2018, Mr. Xi gave an address titled “Marx’s Theory Still Shines With Truth.” The Marxist theory of history of which Mr. Xi spoke, known as historical materialism, postulates the inexorable development of society’s “forces of production.” The changed “economic base” scraps the old “superstructure”—politics, culture, values—and replaces it with a new system befitting economic progress. The overthrow of capitalism and the onset of communism are inevitable consequences of this process.
Some comrades, Mr. Xi said at the start of his rule, may regard communism as “beyond reach,” even “illusory,” but that’s due to their “infirm” appreciation of historical materialism. He asserted that reality has repeatedly proved Marx and Friedrich Engels’s analysis of the basic contradictions of capitalist society is true. That “capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to triumph,” he said, is “the irreversible general trend of social and historical development.”
Historical materialism is key to what Mr. Xi has extolled as Marxism’s “practical character,” with which the party “arms itself.” The Marxist theory of history, he has emphasized, quoting Lenin, who was quoting Engels, “is not a rigid dogma” but rather a “guide to action.”
China did take action. “Hide your strength and bide your time,” Deng Xiaoping, another devoted Marxist and the father of post-Mao economic reform, decreed in the 1980s. China’s gross domestic product was then less than $350 billion. By the time Mr. Xi assumed power in late 2012, China’s GDP had grown more than 24-fold, to $8.53 trillion. By last year, that figure had in turn more than doubled, to $18 trillion.
Having unleashed the “forces of production,” Mr. Xi proclaimed in his 2018 address on Marx’s birthday, the party had achieved in a brief window a degree of economic success that it took the West centuries to reach. Apparently, the time had come to adjust Deng-designed “superstructure.” In growing “prosperous,” Mr. Xi said, China was “becoming strong”—strong enough, he explained separately, to be “willing and able to contribute more to mankind.”
Here, too, Marx pointed the way. Philosophers “only interpret” the world, but “the point is to change it,” Marx famously wrote. It follows that Mr. Xi has emphasized Marx’s “unremitting fight to overturn the old world and establish a new one.” The new world order, Mr. Xi has vowed, “cannot be just dominated by capitalism and the West, and the time will come for a change.” It’s telling that Fidel Castro once hailed Mr. Xi as “one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders” he had ever met.
The prospect of revolutionary change is all the more alluring because of what Mr. Xi has described as “once in a century” and “profound” changes sweeping the world. Explaining Mr. Xi’s address before the 2017 Party Congress, the People’s Daily, the Central Committee’s official newspaper, argued that Western dominance of international relations has become “hard to sustain,” as have the “Western values” intrinsic to international relations.
Enter Mr. Putin’s war. Beyond obvious geopolitical gains, a Russian victory would offer a powerful vindication of the Marxist theory of history. A demoralized and degraded West would be Exhibit A of the decay of “bourgeois democracies,” validating what the Central Committee has called the party’s place on the “right side of history and the side of human progress.”
Mr. Xi’s inspirations—Lenin, Stalin, Mao—all forged or expanded communist regimes during or following wars. Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler also offers an uncanny parallel to Mr. Xi’s support for Mr. Putin: a communist state aiding a fascist state in its war on the capitalist West.
Driven by what the People’s Daily has called a “powerful sense of mission,” the faithful Marxist in Beijing, who holds a doctorate in Marxist theory, will stand by Russia in pursuit of a victory that his dogma foretells.
Mr. Aron is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War.”
