My article in Revue Conflits: Is China communist?
I have an article in Revue Conflits (no. 64, July-August 2026, special report “China, a challenge for Europe”) on a deceptively simple question: is China still communist?
More Lenin than Marx
What structures the CCP is not Capital, it is What Is to Be Done? — the vanguard party, iron discipline, democratic centralism, the conviction that the masses left to themselves never rise beyond trade-unionist consciousness: pure Lenin. The CCP works the way Lenin thought a revolutionary party should work, but it no longer makes revolution. It administers. Wang Huning is not a Marxist theorist in the classical sense. He is an engineer of Leninist power, adapting the organisational software without ever touching the hard core.
And yet there is something deeply Marxist about it
The CCP carries a radical thesis: politics can and must subordinate the economy — the exact opposite of the Western consensus since the 1980s. The future Motuo dam in Tibet (potentially the largest hydroelectric installation in the world) is not the product of a private profitability calculation; it is a political decision. When Xi summoned Jack Ma in 2020 to block Ant Group’s stock market listing, the message was crystal clear: the digital fiefdoms will not govern. The institution of the Party cell in every company — made compulsory in the statutes of state-owned enterprises since 2016 — is the institutional expression of this primacy of politics.
An export model?
What China exports is not communism. The sinicisation of Marxism under Xi focuses on “Chinese characteristics”, the millennia-old civilisation, socialist Confucianism. A Marxism rooted in national culture — and therefore not a bearer of the universality of proletarian internationalism.
“Xi Jinping Thought is not the Manifesto: it speaks to a Chinese nation, not to the workers of the world.”
Answering the question
Is China communist? If we mean a country aiming for the abolition of private property, the self-emancipation of the proletariat and the Workers’ International: no. By those criteria, the USSR never was either. If we mean a Leninist party that draws its legitimacy from the promise of growing prosperity: yes, in its own way.
The final paradox: Xi’s CCP, through its state grip on capitalism and its top-down redistribution, looks more like the Kuomintang of the 1970s-1980s than Mao’s CCP. Single party, mixed economy, civilisational nationalism, rising living standards as the source of legitimacy. The parallel is unsettling.