Changsha is electric. Its nightscape thrums with neon; even at midnight the streets teem with youngsters on the prowl – shopping, eating, livestreaming. A conurbation of ten million, the capital of China’s Hunan province may not be widely known abroad, but within China it has a reputation as a city on amphetamines. Unlike other Chinese cities that have built their reputations on manufacturing or technology, Changsha has centered its brand on non-stop fun – an irony, given its historical significance as an intellectual and organisational cradle for the revolutionary-minded luminaries who shaped the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It was here that a young Mao Zedong spent his formative years as a student and first encountered the ideas of Karl Marx.Immersed in the consumer cacophony of Changsha for two days, I can think of few other places in China that more neatly encapsulate its contradictions. The two most iconic landmarks in the city are a gigantic statue of former CCP chairman Mao (the largest in China), and a local tea shop franchise, Chayan Yuese. Known as Sexy Tea in English, Chayan Yuese has taken the country by storm with its hyper-bourgeois offerings – think: orchid lattes and sea-salt caramel pretzels.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyChangsha is also home to one of the country’s largest and most influential institutes of Marxism. With a faculty of almost eighty full-time researchers and a full range of undergraduate, masters, and doctoral programmes, the School of Marxism at Hunan University is a central node in the Chinese state’s extensive apparatus for ideological education. Beijing is funding the growth of these institutes across the country, but what exactly is taught and researched there?I am visiting Hunan university to find out how Marxism fits into a city – and a country – where the proletariat would rather be livestreaming. The school is housed centrally, in a red brick building within the extensive, leafy grounds of the campus. My chief interlocutor is Yuan Baishun, professor and associate dean, though a scattering of junior researchers and students are also present for the meeting, lined up across a long table from me.I introduce myself with my Chinese name, Ai Bei. The professor asks me to call him by his English name, Douglas. Everyone says they are pleased that an Indian journalist is showing interest in the institute’s work. Pleasantries over I ask the million Yuan question: what does Marxism have to do with the $20 trillion manufacturing juggernaut that is contemporary China?The room breaks into knowing smiles and all heads turn to look at Douglas. The school, he begins, looks at how best to apply the specific practices of Marxism within the specific conditions of China. He is referring to the CCP’s signature catchall: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Said characteristics have served as explanation for every ideological whiplash unleashed on the nation since Deng Xiaoping declared that the colour of a cat was of scant concern so long as it caught mice.“The fundamental principles of Marxism remain the same, but the focus changes,” Douglas continued. “So, we had the ‘three represents of Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao’s Scientific Outlook and now, Xi Jinping’s Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” For those who are CCP jargon-virgins, these are the defining ideological contributions of China’s last three paramount leaders – each one an attempt to square the circle of Marxist orthodoxy with the realities of a China that does not look anything like what Marx may have imagined.Also read: Supply Chains, AI, Hormuz, Taiwan: What’s at Stake as Trump Meets Xi in Beijing?Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents, articulated in the early 2000s, held that the Communist Party should represent not just workers and peasants but also advanced productive forces ie: China’s emerging capitalist class. Hu Jintao’s Scientific Outlook on Development, which came next, shifted emphasis toward sustainability and social harmony, a tacit acknowledgement that breakneck growth had produced inequality and environmental damage, threatening the party’s legitimacy. Xi Jinping Thought reasserts party supremacy across all domains of Chinese life – economic, cultural, and ideological – while asserting that China’s development path offers an alternative model to Western liberal democracy.How about Maoism, I ask? Is that still relevant? “It is absolutely relevant,” Douglas’ tone, gentle until now, turns momentarily thundering. “Mao thought remains fundamental to every period of time. It just changes format according to the needs of each period.” I press him for Maoist ideas that have remained constant through China’s particularly vertiginous vicissitudes. Douglas misses but a single beat before replying, “Seek truth from facts. And also, the party exists to ‘serve the people’. ”At this point I am shown a long power point presentation by assistant professor, Wu Xiaoliang unimaginatively titled, “Xi Jinping Thought on Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” It begins with bracing summaries of the “ten clarifications,” “fourteen persistences” and “thirteen achievements,” that Xi outlined in his speech to the 19th CCP National Congress in 2017. To a mind untrained in party speak, it is impenetrable: a procession of phrases like “comprehensive governing,” “absolute leadership,” and “core socialist values” that the brain refuses to attach to meaning.Then, abruptly, the presentation changes register. The dense ideological idiom gives way to graphs and pie charts under the heading, “The Miracle of Rapid Economic Development.” China’s industrial value-added, we are informed, skyrocketed from 162.1 billion RMB in 1978 to 41.7 trillion RMB by 2025. The country contributes over 30% to global manufacturing growth. In 2025, 130 Chinese firms featured in the Fortune Global 500.Slides enumerate achievements in space technology – lunar landings, orbital stations, the launch of Origin Wukong, China’s third-generation superconducting quantum computer. A Gallup survey ranked China third in the world for personal safety in 2025, with 94% of residents saying they felt safe. Then come the poverty-alleviation figures: 770 million people lifted out of destitution since 1979, followed by a cascade of statistics with a dizzying number of zeros — kilometres of rural roads, railway tracks, power grids, fibre optic cable. Life expectancy. Health insurance. Pensions. Afforestation. Renewable energy.In essence the presentation claims that all of China’s remarkable achievements – economic, social and scientific – fall under the rubric of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, ie CCP rule. Despite the nomenclature, the School of Marxism is less concerned with Marxist theory than with investigating best practices for governance – with one non-negotiable caveat: all praxis must unfold under the guidance of the party and further its continued grip on power. The ideological component has little to do with communist dogma and everything to do with instilling faith in the CCP as the indispensable steward of China’s destiny. To paraphrase Deng: it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it’s the party that decides what counts as a mouse.And it also becomes clear that for all its ideological packaging, the operating logic of the Chinese state is pragmatic. Beneath the turgid jargon – the “ten clarifications” and “fourteen persistences” – lies a system that is, at its core, organised around the identification of goals and the delivery of results. Language matters; the ability to encode and decode messages in the party idiom is a necessary skill to flourish. But while idiomatic proficiency may be necessary, it is not sufficient. Performance is the ultimate currency. The party’s legitimacy rests not on the consistency of its ideological doctrines, but on its ability to point to 770 million people lifted out of poverty, 79-year life expectancies, and 130 companies in the Fortune 500.This is the inverse of governance in many liberal democracies, where the chasm between rhetorical promises and concrete results has deepened to the point that it is not just unremarkable but expected.Also read: Trump Offers Platitudes While Xi Warns of Possible Confrontation During China SummitProfessor Yuan himself turns out to be an anti-corruption specialist who sits on the board of Transparency International’s China chapter – rather than the old-school ideologue one might expect to run a School of Marxism. It’s a detail that adds credence to the idea that the institute is less concerned with doctrinal purity than with the practicalities of governance. China has always been a fundamentally pragmatic civilisation. Confucianism, after all, is less a metaphysical religion than a practical framework for organising state and society. The “Chinese characteristics” in Socialism with Chinese Characteristics could be read as precisely this: a results-oriented pragmatism grafted onto an ideology that has elsewhere been more articulate in revolution than development.The school is expanding. It admitted its first undergraduate class only four years ago, having previously offered advanced degrees exclusively. This summer, thirty students will graduate – the majority Chinese, a handful from fellow socialist states like Laos and Vietnam. Most plan to pursue academic careers, feeding into the network of Marxism research institutes burgeoning across China. Others have their sights set on joining the country’s pervasive bureaucracy.Ma Ning, a PhD student, tells me she completed a Masters in anti-corruption studies before joining the Marxism institute: a move she explains as having to do with the “field developing in a strong direction. The career development is good.” Ning’s undergraduate degree, from her home province of Henan, was in public administration.By the time I leave the school that afternoon, the drizzle that has kept the city under a cold grey sky has ceased and the sun is making a tentative appearance. I make my way to Orange Island, Changsha’s top tourist draw and one of the country’s main sites for Red Tourism – state-promoted pilgrimages to sites of revolutionary heritage, from battlefields to the birthplaces of leaders.Orange Island is most famous for its giant statue of a young Mao Zedong. Completed in 2009, its dimensions were chosen for their symbolism: its length of 83 metres mirrors Mao’s age at his death, and its width of 41 metres marks the number of years he led the CCP.Even as the rain starts up again, the statue is thronged by enthusiastic tourists from across the country, snapping selfies between sips of takeaway lattes. Behind them, the chairman looms – his expression vaguely sour, as if tut-tutting at what a pass the world has come to.Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With ‘Writing on the Great Wall’, she places her eye on China’s economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.