A top economist has joined the growing list of China’s elite to have disappeared from public life after criticizing Xi Jinping, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Zhu Hengpeng served as deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for around a decade.
CASS is a state research think tank that reports directly to China’s cabinet. Chen Daoyin, a former associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, described it as a “body to formulate party ideology to support the leadership.”
According to the Journal, the 55-year-old disappeared shortly after remarking on China’s sluggish economy and criticizing Xi’s leadership in a private group on WeChat.
Oh believe me, I know. They don’t care about what Marx actually said.
Frankly, Marx strikes me more as an anarchist than a communist, at least insofar as those labels are used today. I suspect he’d find tankies repellent.
The end goal of Marxism is Communism, which is anarchist by a strict definition. There are quibbles between traditional Marxists and anarchists on how to get there - with Marxists typically taking a “We need to take over the state first” approach and anarchists going for “Dismantling/bypassing the state is literally step 1” approach. Tankies, of course, mock ‘anarkiddies’ without the slightest hint of what the end state of Communism is, because they love slobbering on authoritarian boots.