Reflections | What unites Karl Marx and China’s first emperor? State ideology, ruthlessly enforced
By enforcing a strict, singular school of thought that it was perilous to question, China’s first emperor set in place a model of intellectual administration that remains today
China recently presented a 5.5-metre-tall bronze statue of Karl Marx to Trier, the German philosopher’s birthplace, to mark his bicentenary.
Marx’s theory that class struggle forms the basis of human history and development is the central tenet of China’s belief system. One may dismiss the Communist Party adherence to Marxist ideology as mere lip service, given its relentless pursuit of capitalism that has resulted in social inequality, but students and civil servants in mainland China still have to study courses in Marxism-Leninism, which, together with its party sanctioned variants, remains the only ideology the state assiduously upholds, by force if necessary.
It was the intellectual golden age, when the teachings of philosophers such as Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, Xunzi, Mozi and more developed into “the hundred schools of thought”, which included Confucianism, Legalism, Taoism and Moism, each vying to convince ruling elites of the veracity of its theories and the advantages that could be gleaned from its adoption.