If we’re talking about the policy makers, then the old school Mao era central planners were all purged back in the 1990s (Chen Yun et al.). Marxism has been banished to the humanities departments in the academia. The policy making decision is mostly advised by neoclassical economists at this point.

However, there are still mandatory Marxism-Leninism class in universities, which, to be quite frank, are just patriotism classes these days. This is the kind of classes that 99% of the students will find boring except for those politics nerds (you know, the type of people who love to post and argue on leftist internet forums lol), yet it is undeniable that the students are being primed to seek out socialist theories. When life was good, nobody really cared. But in times when the economy isn’t going so well, suddenly you begin to question “is this really the socialism I’m being taught?”

With the rapid development of China’s economy over the past two decades, deep inequalities also began to emerge. In late 2019, there was a small resurgence of reading Mao’s work, mostly by college students from middle class background because these are the people who have the most time to study. The working class is far too exhausted to read theory.

Then Covid hit in 2020 and people suddenly had more time to do some soul searching with Mao. This coincided with the failure of the Chinese economy to pick up pace after abandoning the Zero Covid policy in early 2023. At first, people thought, OK, maybe the economy is still recovering, let’s give it some time. The mood was still optimistic.

During that time, the property prices peaked in 2021 and the Evergrande implosion that unfolded between 2021-2023 also caused many people, especially the middle class and the many corporations that had jumped on to the property buying frenzy in the 2010s, to start losing their wealth.

By mid-2024, it became clear that the economy is unlikely to return to the pre-Covid level. Pessimism began to spread and people started to save money (there is no welfare in China for most people, so losing your job can be a big deal especially if you still have 20-30 years of mortgage to pay), which led to a deflationary spiral. As businesses began to lose profit because people are unwilling to spend, production shrinkage turned into layoffs and wage stagnation. Nearly 40-50% of fresh graduates could not find jobs. The tangping (lying down) movement is picking up pace, as the youth become increasingly disillusioned about their future.

By 2025, all hope is lost. I don’t know of anyone who still believe that we can return to the pre-Covid level of economic spending in a short period. Even the most optimistic think we have to endure until the end of the decade. So, it should not surprise you that some people are beginning to question about the “socialism” in China, which is being made more dissonant by the fact that, on the one hand, great infrastructure building and China becoming a superpower, and on the other, the positive outlook of the 2010s where jobs were abundant and personal wealth was rapidly rising was all gone.

As I have written elsewhere, it all comes down to unleashing the domestic consumer market to offset the export and investment sectors, both of which have now run their courses. However, the massive wealth inequality, which had not been addressed in the decades prior, is exactly what’s causing weak consumption. This is the root cause of the problem, hence what I said before about whether the government is serious about tacking the wealth inequality issue.