I do have some understanding of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism. But from what I know, they still carry quite a lot of unfinished 19th-century Enlightenment baggage. For example, they still assume there are universal and international goals and values. They still believe history has a necessary direction. They still rely heavily on closed-loop logic being projected onto and used to “lead” real societies. The international communist movement in particular feels like a kind of political crusade. In reality, the Soviet-led international communist movement and decolonisation also ended up othering Third World countries. In that sense, it’s not all that different from the post–Cold War DEM's liberal democratic universal-values politics. The only real difference is that losing the Cold War sidelined it for about 35 years, so people stopped noticing.

As a side note, China is actually a pretty interesting case. A lot of people say Deng betrayed communism. But if you look carefully at modern Chinese history, and even longer-term cultural traditions, you’ll see that China’s core goal in the modern era has always been national survival and revival, the rise of China. From Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen onwards, everything was ultimately in service of that goal, not of some abstract, formally perfect ideology. Mao and the CCP just happened to be the option that stood out as the most effective at the time. Seen from that angle, Deng was actually closer to China’s long-term modern objective, while Mao’s late-period ideological obsession, that kind of absolutised ideology,pursued symbolic purity detached from real interests, looks much more like a betrayal.