Ghosts of Legitimacy
I don’t know much about China. I’ve been there once. Took a train from Zurich to Shanghai. Travel doesn’t make anyone an expert.
But from a distance, I see a paradox: a state that quotes Marx while running one of the hardest capitalist machines on the planet.
People say Xi reads Marx in the morning while presiding over property bubbles, sweatshop shifts, and a billionaire class that could buy half (or probably all) of Switzerland. Everyone knows it’s absurd. Yet the portrait of Marx stays on the wall. Marx himself remains as a ghost. A relic that blesses what would otherwise look like plain authoritarian capitalism.
It lives with its own ghost.
We claim democracy. We preach it like a secular scripture and wear it as a moral crown. America calls itself the second birthplace of democracy after Athens. But its democracy allows you to run for office only if you are rich, or at least carried by the rich.
Lobbyists write policy. PACs shape elections. Banks, Pharma, and Big Tech pull the strings. Yes, freedom of speech exists. At least on paper. But what does it mean if debt and despair have already written your life? You can shout until your throat burns. The system is deaf by design. It was never designed to respond to voices without leverage.
Europe is no exception: Democracy remains the word, even when outcomes are filtered, rerun, or quietly neutralized by bureaucracy. Always in the name of values. Always with the tone of moral hygiene. What is managed is not democracy itself, but its appearance. And free speech in Europe? It is praised in principle and punished in practice.
So the West should not laugh too loud at China’s paradox.
China lives under Marx while practicing capitalism.
America lives under democracy while practicing oligarchy,
Europe follows the same pattern, with speech increasingly constrained.
The difference is simple:
Their ghost is Marx.
Ours is Pericles.
Both are dead. Both function as requisites. Both are invoked to sanctify decisions made long before anyone votes or speaks.
The question is not who is better off, or who is more moral: China or the West?
The question is who loses faith first.
Because the truth is harsh:
In China, you must obey.
In the West, you must believe.
The mask differs. The play does not.
Systems do not collapse because of what they call themselves.
They collapse when the gap between promise and reality becomes irreparable.
First comes disbelief, when the gap is first felt.
Then cynicism, when ignoring it becomes impossible.
Then anger, when ignoring it becomes intolerable.
Through this lens, every seat of government follows the same logic.
Beijing. Brussels. Washington.
Every political system is ruled by its ghosts until they stop working.
PS: A simple test: If this essay reads as an attack on your system rather than a reflection on legitimacy, the ghost it names is still doing its work.