A forty-something man emerges with a swagger from a Mercedes-Benz at a four-star hotel in Jinggangshan, Jiangxi, a Prada pouch under his arm and a beautiful woman in her early 20s, in a Gucci dress and high heels, at his side.
They look like aliens in China's communist Mecca as it gears up for the celebration of the Communist Party's 90th anniversary. Red hammer-and-sickle flags are everywhere, along with red posters with revolutionary slogans, red lanterns, and people, mostly tourists, in Red Army uniforms, red stars on their caps and red armbands on their arms.
The scene exemplifies the dialectic in today's China, where a vigorous and pragmatic capitalism flourishes in an avowedly socialist country under the leadership of what is, in name, a Marxist party.
As the party looks back on its first 90 years, triumphantly but selectively, on Friday, focusing on its wartime glory and the economic successes of the past three decades, it is hard to tell exactly what is communist about what is being celebrated.
But contrast China's rapid development and vibrancy with the 80 years before 1921, when the weak Qing dynasty ceded Hong Kong to the British and China became a semi-colonised country, and the 38 years under Nationalist rule between 1911 and 1949, when the nation endured famine, rule by warlords and a Japanese invasion, and there is certainly a lot to celebrate.
The Chinese Communist Party, now the world's largest political party, with 80 million members, has evolved from a revolutionary party based on the theories of Karl Marx into an institutionalised party characterised by nationalism and authoritarian rule.
In the mid-1920s, the Soviet Union told its Chinese comrades a proper communist revolution could only be led by the urban proletariat after a bourgeois revolution had put an end to feudalism. The party was, therefore, first directed to ally itself with the Nationalists. However, Mao Zedong changed that strategy and positioned the party to lead a successful, rural-based revolution.