Memes

his “B.S. in chemical engineering” came out of a hollow program for politically favored people, and his 1998-2002 “doctorate in Marxism” was written by his staff.

Sounds like a bunch of unsubstantiated rumours

he is widely disliked within the party

What.

he controls the levers that keep him in place.

I hate it when liberals try to talk about other country's political systems. The fuck are "levers of power"? Are there a set of levers in the NPC that if you control you can change the weather in china or something? Joking aside, there is no explanation of what the fuck mechanism there is by which xi can be chair of the party despite being disliked by it.

Its utter emptiness is evident when you set it side-by-side with his parallel claim to inherit Confucius

This is the closest the article comes to making a valid critique of xi's grasp on Marxism. While I am skeptical of the value of confusian thinking myself, it is ironically anti-materialist to assume that a pure Marxism untainted by the values and traditions of a person can exist.

I would much rather chinese communists openly proclaim the influence of their culture on their thinking than for them to assume that they have surpassed the flow of time. As althusser puts it, the distinguishing mark of ideology is that it proclaims itself to have no history. As such, Xi's view is far closer to the scientific practice of Marxism than to ideology (in the marxist sense).