Somehow I missed this news last fall:
At the sixteenth [Chinese Communist Party] Congress last November, where Jiang [Zemin] handed over the reins to Hu [Jintao], the CCP cut its last links to its past as a revolutionary Marxist organization. For the first time, CCP leaders formally allowed capitalists into the party. They abandoned their long-standing claim to represent only the working class and now champion all of society’s interests and embrace free-market economic policies. At the conference, keynote speakers dropped all references to Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin.
Good news, right? As Jasper Becker explains (sub req’d), the country’s leaders have found a model for post-Marxist China: fascist Italy.