Chinese coming back to Marx amid crisis
Posted: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 10:31 AM
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Beijing, China
By NBC News Bo Gu
BEIJING – Just 126 years after his death, Karl Marx’s moment may finally have arrived.
The People’s Press – the biggest publishing house for China’s orthodox revolutionary books – reports that Marx’s anti-capitalism opus "Das Kapital" has been selling about 4,000-5,000 copies nationwide a month since last November. That’s a big jump from before the economic crisis, when the book sold well under 1,000 copies per month on average.
The "Selected Works by Mao Zedong," a book owned by almost every Chinese citizen a few decades ago, is also witnessing a big jump in sales since late last year, according to Mr. Pan from the People’s Press circulation department.
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| Bo Gu/NBC News |
| Chinese shoppers peruse Beijing’s Utopia bookshop. |
Han Deqiang, a university professor, believes these sales trends reflect the fact that many Chinese are starting to question their new economic orthodoxy.
"For so many years we’ve been wading across the stream by feeling the way, trying to reach the other side of the stream in capitalism. Now the building on the bank has collapsed, and we realize maybe we had a wrong goal?" said Han.
With China’s economy characterized by widespread privatization and double-digit growth rates over the past 30 years, Marx’s critique of capitalism had fallen out of favor. But his "bible" of communism – first published in 1867 and worshipped by the Chinese people decades ago – seems to have found a new audience in China amid the global economic crisis, as evidenced by book sales.
Late last year, news organizations reported a similar trend in Germany, Marx’s birthplace.
"It's definitely in vogue right now," Joern Schuetrumpf, director of "Das Kapital’s" Berlin publisher, told The Associated Press. "The financial crisis brought us a huge bump."
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| Bo Gu/ NBC News |
| Beijing’s Utopia bookshop sells titles like the "Biography of Hugo Chavez" and "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History." |
Leftist shop’s sales up
At "Utopia," a tiny bookshop in the academic center of Beijing’s Haidian district, sales of "Das Kapital" are on the rise, according to Fan Jinggang, the bookshop’s manager. He said his store has sold about five copies a month over the last six months compared to just two copies a year previously.
"Some scholars on our Web site had already predicted the economic crisis as early as in 2007, but the mainstream opinions were too optimistic. Now our Web site is receiving 100,000 hits every day and both ‘Das Kapital’ and ‘Selected Works of Mao Zedong’ are selling better," said Fan.
Fan’s Beijing bookstore and Web site don’t sell the usual fare of popular novels or business texts you might find in other shops – instead it caters to a more leftist clientele.
Shelves are lined with titles like the "Biography of Hugo Chavez" and "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History." Pictures of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong are the only decorations on the wall other than a clock above the counter.
Han, the university professor, is one of the writers on Utopia’s site.
"We thought the market economy was the only way out, it’s so widely accepted," he said. "But it’s natural to come back to Karl Marx and Mao when we find what we believed earlier isn’t always correct."
