Politics & Power Quote by Iris Chang

Chang’s line lands like a field note that’s also an indictment: communism, as lived ideology, has thinned into branding while the engines underneath run on profit. The phrasing “pure communist spirit” is deliberately slippery. She’s not measuring policy alone; she’s pointing at a morale, a collective faith. By calling it “spirit,” Chang implies something that should animate daily life, not just appear in party slogans. The punch is that it’s missing, not because of foreign pressure or popular rebellion, but because everyone is “engaged” in capitalism as an ordinary fact of survival and ambition.

“Engaged in capitalistic enterprises” carries a quiet, almost weary irony: capitalism isn’t framed as liberation, just as the default hustle. The subtext is a society learning to speak two languages at once. In one register, the state remains the official narrator of national purpose. In the other, markets dictate the plot. That tension is sharpened by her pivot: “Much of the country still operates under government control.” She refuses the clean Western story of “China turned capitalist.” Instead, she sketches a hybrid reality where the state keeps the levers (land, banking, censorship, strategic industries) even as it invites competition and accumulation.

Contextually, this reads like post-reform China seen without romance: Deng-era marketization and the rise of private wealth alongside a party-state that never ceded political authority. Chang’s intent is to puncture simplistic binaries. The more interesting question she tees up is not “communist or capitalist?” but what happens to legitimacy when ideology becomes ceremonial and the system’s real religion is growth.