How Karl Marx survived it all

Implement the 100-year plan!' urge the slogans daubed in white paint all over villages in Guangxi province. The great plans for China never stop even after 50 years of the Communist Party's repeated failures to shape the future by extravagant social engineering.

When, 150 years ago, Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels compared him with Darwin who had proposed the theory of evolution. China's Marxist leaders claim to be scientifically applying the laws of history and human progression which he proposed.

Marx had divined the hidden patterns in history confidently enough to predict the future, the end of capitalism, the destruction of the bourgeoisie, the end of the family and the triumph of the proletariat.

In the new society that was coming, all the means of production would be centralised in the hands of the state.

'The Manifesto has proved incredibly accurate,' enthuses Xu Zhengfan, China's most renowned expert on scientific socialism at the Marxism Department of the People's University in Beijing.

Fifty years on, Communist Party members from the lowest to the high are still convinced that they are applying 'scientific principles' to the planning of a modern society which is accelerating the march of progress, lifting China to the next, and inevitable, stage of social evolution. When the police in Qinghai province reportedly strung up Tibetan Lama Trinley Gyatso in a prison cell and tortured him with electric batons, they warned him that he must confess because they had 'scientific proof' of his guilt.