Inside China’s crackdown on young Marxists

Yuan Yang:

Luke, an undergraduate student at one of China’s elite universities, recalls the day he became a committed Marxist. It was not in the countless hours of compulsory Marxism lectures he endured as part of the undergraduate curriculum, but during his first-year winter break in Beijing. Along with 20 other young workers, he squeezed into a minivan with nine seats and was driven to a small workshop on the outskirts of the city. There, he put together cardboard packages for 12 hours in a below-freezing room with no heating.

What startled him most were the hands of the dozen young women living in the workshop, which were “swollen like radishes” from the cold. Unlike him, they had not had the opportunity to finish school. The boss of the workshop had brought them there from their hometown, and they did not know when they could go back.

“They were like slaves. I thought, this capitalist mode of production can turn people into feudal serfs,” says Luke (not his real name). As he applied acrid-smelling adhesives to the cardboard, he turned over the “tiny coincidences” that separated the lives of the young women from his own, as a student at one of China’s most celebrated universities. The women were the children of workers, as he was, and were about the same age. “I had a really strong wish,” he remembers. “I wanted to make things better.”