Sinified Marxism and its future
Branko Milanović is an economist specialised in development and inequality. His new book, The Visions of inequality, was published October 10, 2023.
Cross-posed from Branko Milanović’s blog Global Inequality and More 3.0
This essay is a (modest) attempt to look at the worldwide meaning of China’s experience as the country is being poised to become this year or the next, according to the official World Bank classification, a high-income economy. This comes forty-six years after China –following several decades of isolation—joined the Word Bank as a low-income country. It thus went from the bottom to the top income classification within less than half-a-century. Moreover, it did so while bringing along more than 1 billion people (the average population of China during this forty-five years’ journey).
But I will not, in this short essay, look at these numbers They are discussed in thousands of publications, including in the first chapter of my Great Global Transformation (published by Penguin in November 2025; US edition, by Chicago University Press, coming out in two weeks). I would try to look at what it means from a different, very long-term ideological angle. In other words, what it might seem to have accomplished to people one or several centuries remote from ours. Indeed, when we look at big historical events like Visigothic invasion of Western Europe, Arab conquest of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, the fall of Constantinople, or European colonization of Africa and Asia, we do not see only the political and economic side of such world-transforming events. We see their ideological importance too. The Visigothic conquest created a Latin-Germanic mixture and unified Christianity in the West. The Arab conquest allowed the West to get back in touch with Greek learning that had been forgotten and destroyed. The decline of Byzantium was the precursor, or the enabler, of the Renaissance as many artists and intellectuals left Constantinople for the safety of Italy. The European conquest of the world brought western ideology, including Marxism, of which I will speak more, to the rest of the world. Even if one does not agree with these simplistic summaries of the ideological effects of big geopolitical changes, it cannot be denied that such “re-orderings” of the world, had, in addition to their obvious political effects, big ideological implications.
If we look at China’s success from the same vintage point, what can we see? I think that the most remarkable ideological result of China’s success will be seen to be a movement toward the ideological, or perhaps even cultural, fusion in the large Eurasian space. I base this on the following reasoning. China’s economic and civilizational success was achieved on an undoubted basis of a European ideology, namely Marxism, which itself was the product of European enlightenment, German philosophy and English political economy. (The triad skillfully summarized by Lenin.) But this was not enough to produce China’s success. Anyone who would try to explain it by these “imported” elements alone would be wrong. They created the basis for success. They might have been necessary, but they do not provide a full explanation of success. Indeed without a Communist Party, China would not have become a rich nation. And the Party came to power thanks to a Western ideology which it skillfully adapted to Chinese circumstances. Yet to be successful and to transform China as it did in the past forty years, it had to fuse these essentially foreign elements with domestic ideologies, first, those largely derived from Legalism, and then from Confucianism. It blended eminently European and Chinese ideological traditions into one that produced economic growth and improved lives of millions.
I cannot put the numbers on the shares (is it half-and-half?) of Marxism and Chinese ideologies in the current thinking of CPC as reflected in the documents published by high party organs and in the speeches of Xi Jinping. But it is very clear to me that they both exist there. Some statements come from the Marxist claviature (interdependence of the forces of production and the relations of productions, dialectics, materialist conception of history, ultimate triumph of socialism) while others –of which Xi Jinping speeches and short anecdotes (which I reviewed here) are full—come from a very different tradition, of Confucianism: virtuous behavior, acceptance of hierarchy based on moral values, self-abnegation. At times, they sit uneasily with each other. I find the combination difficult. To a Marxist-educated person, the introduction of individual moral values as engines of history sounds odd: Marxist philosophy deals with individual interests mostly to the extent that they are fashioned by historical forces that are themselves beyond individual control. Even more: attainment of a superior economic and political system cannot be achieved (only) through an improvement in our individual moral behavior. Rather the reverse: only once such a system is achieved can individual morals improve. As Marx’s famous statement (which he originally wrote when he was in his twenties) says, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. In CPC documents, it is often the moral virtues, that is, human agency, that are stressed, implying they are needed for the attainment of a superior system.
I have noticed this uneasy juxtaposition when I compared my own reading of CPC documents with that of other people who are more versed in Chinese traditional culture and ideology. I would fully understand Marxist-derived elements while I find their relationship with the Chinese ones murky. Others, however, would understand and emphasize references to Chinese values and discount Marxist jargon. The calls for the “Sinification of Marxism”, now the official ideological stance of CPC, present problems to both sides. “Sinification of Marxism” seems to be a desire to combine two very opposite ideologies: one essentially “macro” (dealing with society), the other essentially “micro” (dealing with the individual). Jiang Shigong (belonging to the so-called Chinese “conservative socialists” school) notes the contrast but not only discounts it but finds the two sides complementary.
China has consistently confronted the question of the Sinification of Marxism. As a universal philosophical truth, Marxism must not only be integrated into the concrete practice of Chinese history but must also be merged with Chinese traditional culture. The Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era… employs the traditional Chinese ‘Learning of the Heart’ 心学 to re-enliven Communist ideas, and this accomplishment…has constructed and consolidated the spiritual strength of the entire Party and people. (Open Times, January 2018).
Despite the attempts to paper it over, intellectual discomfort is, I think, always present when new syncretic ideologies are born. It has been also addressed by Samir Amin who was particularly sensitized to the global implications of China’s success and its complex relationship to both Marxism and “real-existing” capitalism.
It has to be recognized that what the most important social and political struggles of the twentieth century tried to challenge was not so much capitalism in itself but the permanent imperialist dimension of actually existing capitalism. The issue is therefore whether this transfer of the center of gravity of the struggles necessarily calls capitalism in question. (“Trajectory of historical capitalism” in Only people make their own history, p. 95).
Sinification of Marxism has not only shown its value in practice (a thing which would surely please Marx), but has led to a fusion of two different ideological traditions. It has brought closer the European or Western, and Chinese ideological “space”. In the same way as the European success has brought Western ideologies to China, a sinified Marxism, built on the back of China’s economic and technological success, will exert its influence over the West and other parts of the world. Through reverse causality, it may influence Western thinking (incorporating there elements of Chinese philosophy), and the new Sino-Western amalgam may be copied by others and become more common in the rest of the world.
Whatever happens to China in future –and no one is sure about that—one fact will remain incontrovertible: the most outstanding economic success in modern history has been achieved by a system that combined domestic culture with Marxism-Leninism in the political sphere and open-ended capitalism in the economy. The long-term ideological effect of China’s economic and technological success may be a greater closeness—not necessarily unification—of worldwide thinking regarding what the ingredients for the best system may be.
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