The LA Times Column One tells about teaching Marxism in China:

IT was like watching a man try to swim up a waterfall.

Professor Tao Xiuao cracked jokes, told stories, projected a Power Point presentation on a large video screen. But his students at Beijing Foreign Studies University didn’t even try to hide their boredom.

Young men spread newspapers out on their desks and pored over the sports news. A couple of students listened to iPods; others sent text messages on their cellphones. One young woman with chic red-framed glasses spent the entire two hours engrossed in “Jane Eyre,” in the original English. Some drifted out of class, ate lunch and returned. Some just lay their heads on their desktops and went to sleep.

It isn’t easy teaching Marxism in China these days.

“It’s a big challenge,” acknowledged Tao, a likable man who demonstrates remarkable patience in the face of students more interested in capitalism than “Das Kapital.” The students say he isn’t the problem.

They should come to American or European universities, the last bastion of Marxist true believers.

But today’s China is, in some respects, less socialistic than much of Western Europe, with a moth-eaten social safety net and a wild free-market economy. Students in almost any urban Chinese school can look out their classroom windows and see just about everything but socialism being constructed: high-rise office buildings, shopping malls, movie theaters, luxury apartment buildings, fast-food restaurants, hotels, factories — the whole capitalist panorama.

IT seems an understatement to say that there’s a disconnect between reality and what the students are learning about Marx and Mao, who held that capitalism would inevitably and naturally give way to communism.

Looks like Mao was wrong.

Professor Tao’s lecture on this day was devoted to the arcane study of epistemology, ranging over the beliefs of Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin and Marx, and building up to Mao’s famous admonition to “seek truth from facts” — hardly a disagreeable notion, but one that kindled no apparent flicker of interest in the students.

Truth from facts would show that communism does not work, and that Mao killed somewhere between 40 and 77 million people trying to refute human nature. I doubt that’s in the curriculum.

Today’s China resembles, in some ways, the US in its post-Civil War, bare-knuckled capitalist era. Vast fortunes were being made, technology was improving the lives of millions and yet millions of common folk still worked 12-hour days and suffered hardship.

Much is made about the huge gap between rich and poor in China. One thing to remember: a very short time ago everyone in China was poor. But I’m sure Mao wouldn’t like them facts.