01 — WHY I MADE THIS
Hi! I’m Nina. I made this site to make Chinese Marxist academic research easier to find for those of us outside China.
This year I’ve been sharing research by Chinese Marxist academics on my TikTok account, @leessyndikaat. I found the articles on marxism.cass.cn, the website of the Academy of Marxism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, but finding them was hard. The site is entirely in Chinese, and its dense, portal-style layout, common on Chinese websites but unfamiliar if you’re used to Western web design, makes it hard to know where to look. Add slow in-browser translation and slow-loading pages, and finding a good article is basically a matter of luck.
The response to those videos was really positive. Many people told me they had been looking for research like this for a long time but couldn’t find it, and even when I pointed them to marxism.cass.cn, they couldn’t find their way around. That convinced me there was a need for this site.
I think it is important for Western Marxists, many of whom have a lot of opinions on China, to understand contemporary Chinese Marxist discourse. Chinese scholars write a great deal about Western academic Marxists such as David Harvey, Slavoj Žižek, John Bellamy Foster and Nancy Fraser: they assess that work in its own context, and ask whether and how it might be useful in China. We hardly engage like that with their scholars at all. Such a shame! So let this be a bridge, and help all of us Marxists outside China get a better understanding of their research.
02 — WHAT YOU’LL FIND HERE
English summaries of around 6,100 articles published on marxism.cass.cn between 2011 and 2026, in the site’s own twelve sections, from Basic Principles of Marxism to Foreign Marxism and CPC History and Party Building. They include Chinese translations of texts by Marxists elsewhere in the world. You can browse the shelves like a library, or search by meaning or by exact words. Every summary links to the Chinese original. New articles will be added regularly.
03 — HOW THE SUMMARIES ARE MADE
Each article is read in full by a language model (Claude Sonnet 5.5), which writes a four-paragraph summary to fixed instructions, with one sentence quoted in the author’s own words, in English and in the original Chinese. Chinese political terms are given in their official English renderings, such as Chinese modernization or new quality productive forces; click a dotted term to see the Chinese, the pinyin and what it means. Automatic checks confirm that each quote appears word for word in the original.
04 — HOW TO READ THEM
The summaries report what the authors argue; they do not endorse, criticise or correct it. Many articles follow official positions of the Communist Party of China, and the summaries say so in the authors’ terms (“the author argues…”, “in Li’s account…”). Figures and historical claims are the authors’ own.
No person reviews the summaries before they appear, so they may contain mistakes: a misread argument, a wrong name, an awkward rendering. Use them to find articles, not as a source to cite, and check the original before quoting it.
05 — READING THE ORIGINALS
marxism.cass.cn only works over an unencrypted connection (http), and it can be slow or unreachable from outside China; some browsers and networks block it. Every summary therefore also links to an archived copy on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
06 — DISCLAIMER
Independent hobby project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences or its Academy of Marxism. All articles remain the work of their authors and publishers. Summaries are machine-generated, unofficial and may contain errors. Authors or publishers who would like a summary changed or removed can contact me, and I will respond promptly.
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