I don’t know much about China. I’ve been there, took once a train from Zurich to Shanghai... but travel doesn’t make me an expert. What I see from afar is a paradox: a state that claims Marxism, yet runs one of the most capitalist economies on earth.
Someone told me Xi reads Marx in the morning while presiding over property bubbles, sweatshop work schedules, and a class of billionaires. Everyone knows it’s absurd, but the portrait still hangs on the wall. Marx lingers as a ghost, legitimizing what would otherwise look like naked authoritarian capitalism.
We claim democracy. We teach it as our faith, we declare it our moral superiority. America calls itself the second birthplace of democracy, after Athens. But what does democracy look like there? You can only become president if you are already fabulously rich or have billionaires behind you.
The so-called land of the free is in practice the land of lobbyists, PACs, and bankers. Elections are bought, not won. Sure, there is freedom of speech—on the surface. But what does freedom of speech mean if you live in a slum, if your life is already decided by poverty, debt, and violence? You can shout all you want, the system won’t hear you.
Europe is no better. Germany still speaks the language of democracy, but what remains of it when the largest or soon-to-be largest party is systematically excluded, demonized, mobbed, shut out under the banner of protecting “democracy”? That’s not democracy, that’s managing the pretense of it.
In other countries, elections have been rerun until the “correct” result appeared. Romania did it, others too. And Brussels wraps the whole thing in the rhetoric of European values, while silencing what it cannot absorb.
So let’s not laugh at China. Yes, they parade under Marx’s banner while living capitalism. But we parade under democracy’s banner while living oligarchy. Their ghost is Marx, ours is Pericles. Both are dead. Both hang on the wall, embalmed, invoked to sanctify what power has already decided.
The truth is harsh: in China, you must obey. In the West, you must believe you’re good. The mask differs, but the play is the same. What matters is not the system’s name, but how wide the gap between promise and reality becomes. Once that gap is too wide, belief turns to cynicism, cynicism to anger. That’s how systems fall; whether in Beijing, Berlin, or Washington.
The question is not which ghost is stronger, but who dares to laugh at themselves first