Animated Marx woos China’s millennials
The camera swoops over a German city, the orchestral score rising to a moving crescendo. A dashing young man is seen gazing wistfully out of a window, pondering the plight of the poor.
So begins the latest attempt to tell the story of Karl Marx to Chinese millennials, presenting the co-author of The Communist Manifesto as a lovestruck philosopher hoping to woo a girl he once described as the most beautiful person in the west German city of Trier: Jenny von Westphalen.
President Xi Jinping has demanded that all citizens become reacquainted with Marx’s life story, 40 years after the nation’s historic shift away from communist ideology towards economic development. The animated series, due to be shown online, seeks to present Marx’s life as a love story, charting the rise of the student son of a Jewish lawyer and his wooing of Jenny, who became his wife.
Gone is the familiar image of a bearded, older Marx, replaced with a handsome, clean-shaven hero with whom, it is hoped, young people can identify.
The trailer for the seven-part series, called The Leader, says: ‘‘Marx was a great man standing upright between heaven and earth, whose ideological system established through his entire life awakened all sleeping proletariat across the world and deeply influenced the historical development of the world.’’
It describes an ‘‘ordinary man of flesh and blood’’ whose ‘‘love for Jenny, which met with much obstruction, and friendship with Engels . . . finally became legendary’’.
He and Jenny were engaged in 1836 and married in 1843, the year that they moved to Paris, where Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, his co-author.
The Leader tells how his relationship with Jenny crossed social boundaries. She had been born into an aristocratic family, who did not approve of Marx.
The series, on Bilibili, a video streaming website, marks the latest effort by the ruling party to spark an interest in Marx among young people. Its production follows last year’s release of Marx Got it Right, a television show that sought to explain his ideals in plain language to millennials.
In May, China commemorated the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth.
Young Chinese start learning Marxist theories in middle school and civil servants must take courses in Marxism to get promoted. The Communist Manifesto is mandatory reading for party officials.
Beijing tolerates no independent studies of Marxism, especially after students from the country’s best universities joined protests to demand better conditions for Chinese workers. –