Joanna
Mike Ballard wrote:
>And they're funding the project with debt service payments from U.S. Government
>Treasuries! Well, maybe..."The answer is blowin' in the wind..."
>
>Thanks to Grant Lee for this jewel,
>Mike B)
>
>Thu Nov 10, 2005 11:43 PM IST
>
>By Benjamin Kang Lim and Guo Shipeng
>
>BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Communist Party plans to spend millions of dollars
>to revive Marxism in an apparent bid to shore up its political legitimacy and
>fill an ideological vacuum that has spawned official corruption. The step might
>seem unusual coming more than 50 years after the Communists swept to power and
>almost three decades after the end of the Cultural Revolution relegated copies
>of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book to storage
>trunks and shops for foreign tourists. Communist revolution has been replaced
>by economic revolution and Soviet-style building projects by skyscrapers, while
>the German economist's
>theories have become virtually unread in China after more than two
>decades of market-oriented reforms. But the new directive appears to have come
>from the top. Communist Party chief Hu Jintao was trained as an engineer, but
>spent his early career as an
>ideological commissar and has overseen a series of campaigns to harden party
>orthodoxy. The party, which has monopolised power since 1949 and ruled out
>Western-style democracy, is borrowing from Marx once again. About 100 million
>yuan ($12 million) will be poured into the first stage of the "Marxist
>Theoretical Research and Construction Project", an academic with knowledge of
>the plan told Reuters. "Whatever amount is asked for will be given," said the
>academic, who asked not to be identified. "Marxism will be utilised to explain
>the party's (political) theories, policies and goals and emphasise the
>Communist Party's legitimacy," he
>said. Unlike previous translations, most based on Russian-language versions of
>Marx's works from the former Soviet Union, the latest tomes will be taken
>directly from the German. The government's 11th five-year development plan
>covering 2006-2010 calls
>for "strengthen(ing) Marxist theoretical research and construction". Under the
>plan, a 300-strong team will publish 13 new university textbooks on issues
>ranging from philosophy to political economy, political science, sociology,
>law, history, news and literature, the Oriental Outlook magazine said.
>The textbooks will have "characteristics of contemporary Chinese
>Marxism" and replace earlier versions based on Soviet translations, it said.
>They need to be approved by the party's all-powerful, nine-member Politburo
>Standing Committee before publication, the weekly said, in an indication of
>their political weight. A 10-volume collection of works by Karl Marx and
>Friedrich Engels and a five-volume collection of Bolshevik leader Vladimir
>Lenin's works will be retranslated and published by 2007.
>The Institute of Marxism under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top
>government think-tank, will be promoted in status to an academy with the number
>of staffers expanded to 200 from 75 currently, the academic and the magazine
>said. The Academy of Marxism will be formally established on Dec. 26 coinciding
>with Mao's 112th birth anniversary, they said. The academy's president will
>hold a rank equivalent to a cabinet vice-minister, up one notch in the civil
>service hierarchy compared with the
>institute director. The party established the Institute of Marxism in 1979 to
>reinterpret Marxism and debunk Mao's ultra-leftist policies. Marx's "Communist
>Manifesto" once served as the bible of China's revolutionary generation.
>China's ruling party is still communist in name but has embraced capitalist
>tools and given its blessings to private enterprises and property.
>
>
>© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.
>
>Read "The Perthian Brickburner":
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>
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