A top economist has joined the growing list of China's elite to have disappeared from public life after criticizing Xi Jinping, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Zhu Hengpeng served as deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for around a decade.
CASS is a state research think tank that reports directly to China's cabinet. Chen Daoyin, a former associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, described it as a "body to formulate party ideology to support the leadership."
According to the Journal, the 55-year-old disappeared shortly after remarking on China's sluggish economy and criticizing Xi's leadership in a private group on WeChat.
In his theory of Historical Materialism. Mao and the later Gang of Four succeeded in broadly eliminating private property, but had done so without developing the Means of Production adequately, resulting in economic stagnation. The people were poor, they had tried to leapfrog development to Communism in an idealist, Utopian manner, which was a rejection of the Historical Materialist idea that the next Mode of Production emerges from the previous.
Communism requires a certain level of industrial development that the PRC did not have, and for that reason the Cultural Revolution was in many ways highly damaging.
Would you have had the PRC uphold the Gang of Four's dogmatic, anti-Marxist line simply because China had largely abolished Private Property? Is it better for the proletarist to be poor under Socialism, or rich under Capitalism?