BEIJING, Nov 10: China’s Communist Party plans to spend millions of dollars to revive Marxism in an apparent bid to shore up its political legitimacy and fill an ideological vacuum that has spawned official corruption.

The step might seem unusual coming more than 50 years after the Communists swept to power and almost three decades after the end of the Cultural Revolution relegated copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to storage trunks and shops for foreign tourists.

Communist revolution has been replaced by economic revolution and Soviet-style building projects by skyscrapers, while the German economist’s theories have become virtually unread in China after more than two decades of market-oriented reforms.

But the new directive appears to have come from the top.

Communist Party chief Hu Jintao was trained as an engineer, but spent his early career as an ideological commissar and has overseen a series of campaigns to harden party orthodoxy.

The party, which has monopolized power since 1949 and ruled out western-style democracy, is borrowing from Marx once again.

About 100 million yuan ($12 million) will be poured into the first stage of the ‘Marxist Theoretical Research and Construction Project’, an academic with knowledge of the plan told Reuters.

“Whatever amount is asked for will be given,” said the academic, who asked not to be identified.

“Marxism will be utilized to explain the party’s (political) theories, policies and goals and emphasize the Communist Party’s legitimacy,” he said.

Unlike previous translations, most based on Russian-language versions of Marx’s works from the former Soviet Union, the latest tomes will be taken directly from the German.

The government’s 11th five-year development plan covering 2006-2010 calls for ‘strengthen(ing) Marxist theoretical research and construction’.

Under the plan, a 300-strong team will publish 13 new university textbooks on issues ranging from philosophy to political economy, political science, sociology, law, history, news and literature, the Oriental Outlook magazine said.

The textbooks will have ‘characteristics of contemporary Chinese Marxism’ and replace earlier versions based on Soviet translations, it said.

They need to be approved by the party’s all-powerful, nine-member Politburo Standing Committee before publication, the weekly said, in an indication of their political weight.

A 10-volume collection of works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and a five-volume collection of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s works will be retranslated and published by 2007.

The Institute of Marxism under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top government think-tank, will be promoted in status to an academy with the number of staffers expanded to 200 from 75 currently, the academic and the magazine said.

The Academy of Marxism will be formally established on Dec. 26 coinciding with Mao’s 112th birth anniversary, they said.

The academy’s president will hold a rank equivalent to a cabinet vice-minister, up one notch in the civil service hierarchy compared with the institute director.

The party established the Institute of Marxism in 1979 to reinterpret Marxism and debunk Mao’s ultra-leftist policies.—Reuters