You come to visit the Pope of Marxism-Leninism up a long and rickety elevator. It is in the process of being refurbished, but instead of being shut down, the elevator continues to run, half alive. The claw-hammer handle that the elevator operators once used has been replaced by gleaming new push buttons, but typically for China, the elevator operator has not been replaced. She still sits there, complete with a little one-foot-square desk and a bottle of green tea, carrying the nation's top Marxists up and down for eight hours a day. The pope has his office on the 13th floor. The ride takes several minutes.
In his office, wireless telephones sit next to socialist reviews. Six green leather chairs (the luxurious, deep kind that Mao always preferred) rest on yellowed linoleum floors, backed by off-blue walls. On his bookshelf, sandwiched between Chinese works on Marx, are two slim English volumes on Business Cycles. The pope wears gray polyester pants and a blue-and-white-checked shirt--short-sleeved and semitransparent so you can see his T shirt. He sips tea from an extra-large mug. Everyone else in the room drinks from a small white one, each stamped with a large red number--144, 78, 33--which gives the room the feel of a lottery. He is 63 years old and tan. It is easy to picture him dispensing gentle ideological wisdom to President Jiang Zemin or Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, providing them with Marxist cover for their very non-Marxist policies.
He radiates intelligence. Even through a translator, he makes Marxism-Leninism seem a living, exciting thing. He is responsible for the spiritual and ideological well-being of 1.3 billion Chinese (a flock that, in status-obsessed China, would make him 30% more powerful than the Pope of Catholicism). As director of the Research Institute of Marxism-Leninism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Fu Qingyuan ministers to everyone from government officials to the nation's academics. At his fingertips is the apparatus of one of the most powerful state information machines in the world, and it can all be harnessed to send one simple message to each of those 1.3 billion people: There is no God. When you die, you're dead. The only finger on your fate is your own. "Many people in China are facing a crisis of faith," he admits. "But I still believe that the majority of the Chinese people believe in dialectical materialism. As Deng Xiaoping predicted: As long as China survives, socialism will survive."