As recently as two years ago, most Chinese economists paid only lip service to Marxism and assigned Western textbooks to their students. The advent of AI has changed that, because the technology—open source and available to the smallest manufacturer for a pittance—promises to avoid the “rent trap” common to capitalist economies.
ATHENS—As China embraced capitalism, its leading universities adopted mainstream Western textbooks to mold their students’ thinking about the economy. “Most of my colleagues pay only lip service to Marxism,” an economics professor in one of China’s top economics departments confessed to me. “Only a tiny minority take Marx seriously.”
