Position open in the Ministry of Circle Squaring

Interested applicants please send a resume and cover letter to the PRC. Members of the reality-based community need not apply. Publius is giving out letters of recommendations.

BEIJING, Dec. 4 -- The Communist Party has launched a campaign among political leaders and senior academics to modernize Chinese Marxism, seeking to reconcile increasingly obvious contradictions between the government's founding ideology and its broad free-market reforms.

The campaign involves the allocation of millions of dollars to produce new translations of Marxist literature and to update texts for secondary school and university students obliged to study the official philosophy, officials said. In addition, the campaign will promote more research on how Marxism can be redefined to inform China's policies even as private enterprise increasingly becomes the basis of its economy, they explained.

The undertaking, which coincides with an 18-month campaign to reinvigorate the party rank and file, seems designed as a response to frequent complaints about the chasm between official discourse in Beijing -- emphasizing "socialism with Chinese characteristics" -- and the growing reality of often unbridled capitalism in which party officials are eager partners.