China’s new ambassador to the United Kingdom has marked the 100th anniversary of Chinese communism with a series of events, including a speech with the Communist Party of Britain and a wreath-laying at the tomb of Karl Marx.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the largest of its kind in the world with an enormous 92 million members, held a joint event over the weekend with one of the smallest, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) at approximately 1,000 members. At a co-hosted event on Saturday, Chinese Ambassador Zheng Zeguang addressed “Comrade Robert Griffiths” — the General Secretary of the CPB since 1998 — and hailed the pioneers of the international communist movement Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who lived in the United Kingdom in the 19th century.
Perhaps trying to encourage the CPB to grow, Ambassador Zeguang told the event: “In the past 100 years, the CPC traversed an epic journey and grew bigger and stronger. From a small group of a dozen to a membership of nearly 92 million, it is now the world’s largest political party”. At the last national election where the CPB stood candidates, they gained a few hundred votes nationwide out of the 30 million votes cast.
Addressing Marx, Zeguang said: “Karl Marx, the architect of Marxist parties and pioneer of the international communist movement… It was here over 170 years ago that [Marx and Engels] discussed… and drafted the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
“More than 100 years ago, Marxism was introduced to China and inspired the founding of the Communist Party of China. For 100 years, the CPC has worked strenuously and made extraordinary achievements. It combined the basic tenets of Marxism with the practical realities of China. It has led the Chinese people to overcome all difficulties and achieve enormous success in the new democratic revolution and the socialist revolution, development and reform.”
Marx had come to London in 1849 as a political refugee and lived in the United Kingdom for the rest of his life. He was buried in north London’s Highgate cemetery — known for holding the graves of near two hundred years worth of political, cultural, and scientific notables — the site of another Chinese Communism 100 year celebration event on Saturday.
Ambassador Zeguang laid a floral wreath at the large marble and bronze monument to Karl Marx, writing of the occasion: “Visited the grave of Karl Marx and paid our high respects, as we are celebrating the centenary of the Communist Party of China.”
An image of the event shared by the ambassador on his unflagged Twitter account clearly shows the cut-in repairs to the marble tablet on the front of the pedestal made after the memorial was attacked with a hammer in 2019. As Breitbart London reported at the time, that was just one of two attacks against the Marx monument that year, which saw it smashed with a hammer and later daubed with red paint reading, among other things, “Memorial to Bolshevik Holocaust… 66,000,000 DEAD”.
The bronze bust of Marx was even the target of a pipe bomb in the 1970s.
Ambassador Zeguang is relatively new in the post. He relieved the previous ambassador Liu Xiaoming earlier this year when Xiaoming was recalled to China. Xiaoming was notoriously combative in his role, frequently goading British political leaders on Twitter. Twitter was Ambassador Xiaoming’s undoing, however, as he was out of a job just months after it was revealed he had ‘liked’ graphic foot fetish videos on the platform.
China, for their part, implied the video of a man receiving relief from a woman wearing a pair of stockings had made its way onto their ambassador’s account because of a “hack” and demanded an investigation.