It would nevertheless be too easy to say that mainland China’s consumer materialism has nothing to do with Marxism simply because Marx himself criticized commodity fetishism. Marxist historical materialism and consumer materialism are conceptually different, but ideas also matter through the political institutions and policy priorities constructed from them.

The CCP has consistently interpreted social development through a materialist conception in which the development of productive forces and material conditions occupies a foundational position. This was particularly consequential after Mao.

The post-Mao leadership shifted the Party’s central task away from class struggle and toward economic construction. The CCP’s own constitution subsequently defined the basic socialist task as developing the productive forces and repeatedly treated improvements in living standards as a criterion by which the Party’s work should be judged. Earlier versions of the Party constitution explicitly described the principal contradiction as one between people’s growing “material and cultural needs” and backward production, while also endorsing the policy of allowing some people and regions to become rich first.

This was not merely economic policy. It helped redefine what progress meant.

Under Mao, political virtue could be demonstrated through revolutionary commitment, class identity, sacrifice and ideological conformity. Under the reform regime, an increasingly important demonstration of the success of socialism became something far more observable: production, income, consumption and rising material living standards.

The CCP itself used the term “material civilization” (物質文明) to describe this dimension of modernization. Contemporary scholarship on CCP ideology traces the concept to the post-Mao ideological transformation, in which economic development occupied the core position alongside a separate project of constructing “socialist spiritual civilization.”

This distinction matters enormously.

The Party did not officially instruct people to become luxury consumers. Nor would it be accurate to claim that Marxist historical materialism logically requires someone to buy Louis Vuitton. But the reform-era political economy increasingly legitimized itself through the production of measurable material prosperity. Economic success became evidence that the political system worked.

There was consequently a profound transition in the social meaning of wealth:

• Maoist China: revolutionary virtue could confer status even in poverty.

• Reform-era mainland China: the capacity to become prosperous increasingly became evidence of individual and national success.

For a population emerging from decades of scarcity, the psychological consequences should not be surprising.

The CCP Recognized the Problem It Had Created

There is particularly revealing evidence that the CCP leadership itself worried about an excessive imbalance toward material advancement.

At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1982, the leadership argued that a high level of socialist spiritual civilization had to be constructed alongside material civilization. Contemporary theoretical discussions explicitly described material civilization as the indispensable basis of spiritual civilization while insisting that spiritual development would not automatically follow from material development.

The concern became sufficiently serious that the Sixth Plenum of the Twelfth Central Committee adopted an entire resolution in September 1986 on the construction of socialist spiritual civilization. The resolution explicitly situated spiritual civilization alongside the construction of material civilization as part of socialist modernization.

This is important evidence because it shows that the tension between material development and moral-cultural development is not simply a criticism invented retrospectively by opponents of the CCP. It existed inside the Party’s own ideological discourse.

Deng’s government wanted both.

It wanted rapid increases in production, income, technology and consumption while simultaneously expecting socialist ideology to supply morality, collective purpose and political legitimacy.

The difficulty was that these two projects did not necessarily develop at the same speed.

Markets could produce refrigerators, apartments, automobiles, foreign travel and eventually luxury handbags remarkably quickly. Creating a convincing system of moral values after the devastation of traditional institutions and the declining credibility of revolutionary ideology was much more difficult.

The result was a peculiar contradiction of post-Mao mainland China:

The Party successfully liberated the pursuit of material prosperity without equally liberalizing the institutions through which individuals independently construct moral, religious, civic and political meaning.

That distinction is essential.

Material Prosperity without an Independent Civil Society

Here the Cultural Revolution and earlier Communist transformations become relevant.

The CCP had already attacked many alternative sources of social authority: religious organizations, traditional elites, private property, independent associations, inherited businesses and much of the institutional continuity through which cultural capital had historically been transmitted.

Reform and opening subsequently restored markets much faster than it restored an autonomous civil society.

The entrepreneur returned.

The private company returned.

The private apartment returned.

The international consumer returned.

But independent churches, autonomous universities, genuinely independent civic organizations, political pluralism and constitutional limits on political authority did not develop comparably.

This meant that economic liberalization occurred without an equivalent liberalization of the institutions through which people could organize social meaning independently of either the Party or the marketplace.

The resulting vacuum matters.

When revolutionary ideology loses much of its capacity to inspire, traditional institutions have been severely disrupted, independent civil society remains restricted, but individual income rises dramatically, consumption becomes one of the relatively safe and readily available ways to construct identity.

The luxury product then performs more than an economic function. It provides status, distinction, international identity and visible evidence of personal achievement.

This does not mean that every mainland Chinese luxury consumer is spiritually empty. Such a proposition would be both unprovable and unfair. It means that the institutional environment made material consumption unusually capable of performing social functions that other institutions perform elsewhere.

The Irony of “Spiritual Civilization”

The CCP has never completely abandoned its concern about this problem. Indeed, the current leadership still describes modernization as requiring both “material abundance” and “spiritual enrichment.” Xi Jinping’s formulation of Chinese modernization explicitly places material and cultural-ethical advancement together.

But herein lies a deeper institutional problem.

The Party’s answer to excessive materialism has generally been more state-directed morality: socialist spiritual civilization, patriotic education, ideological education and officially approved cultural values.

That is fundamentally different from allowing a pluralistic civil society to generate competing conceptions of the good life.

A Hayekian objection becomes relevant here. Moral and cultural orders contain dispersed knowledge just as economic orders do. A government cannot easily determine from above what millions of individuals should regard as meaningful, admirable or virtuous.

The paradox is therefore striking.

The CCP used markets to decentralize a substantial part of the production of material goods, while continuing to seek centralized influence over the production of ideas and values.

Markets became increasingly capable of answering:

What do people want to buy?

But independent institutions remained much less free to answer:

What kind of life is worth living?

Luxury consumption flourished in the space between these two questions.

This Strengthens Rather Than Replaces the Veblen Explanation

This interpretation should therefore be combined with Veblen and Bourdieu rather than substituted for them.

Veblen explains why visible consumption can communicate status.

Bourdieu explains why newly accumulated economic capital does not automatically produce accumulated cultural capital.

Marxist-Leninist institutional history helps explain why mainland China’s older structures of cultural and social authority underwent such an extraordinary historical rupture.

And the CCP’s post-Mao development strategy helps explain why material prosperity subsequently became such an important source of political legitimacy and social evaluation.

The causal sequence is therefore considerably more sophisticated than:

Marxism → materialism → luxury handbags.

A more defensible hypothesis is:

Communist institutional destruction weakened alternative sources of identity and inherited cultural capital; post-Mao reform then elevated material development and improving living standards to central measures of political and social progress; extraordinarily rapid wealth creation produced new economic elites faster than cultural and institutional capital could regenerate; and global luxury brands supplied an exceptionally efficient language through which newly acquired wealth could be converted into visible social status.

That is an argument we can actually defend with historical evidence.

And there is an irony here that I think belongs in your conclusion: the same political system that repeatedly warns mainland Chinese society against excessive materialism helped construct the institutional environment in which material achievement became one of the most visible and politically permissible measures of success. The Party calls for both material and spiritual civilization precisely because the imbalance between the two has been an acknowledged problem since the early reform era.

I would incorporate this into the full article rather than merely add one paragraph. It makes your thesis considerably stronger: the article would no longer be simply about why some mainland Chinese tourists buy luxury goods in Europe; it becomes a political-economy essay about the unintended cultural consequences of post-Mao modernization.

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How to Cite this Article (APA 7th edition)

Wang, H. H. (2026, August 30). From Marxist Materialism to a Material Measure of Progress. https://williamhongsongwang.com/2026/08/30/from-marxist-materialism-to-a-material-measure-of-progress/