Salon.com's Andrew Leonard has a great meditation on contradiction and duality in modern China, of which we have seen plenty. His metaphor is the site of the first big meeting of the Chinese communist party in Shanghai, which now is surrounded by a swank, mixed-use development patronized by the grand bourgeoisie that party leader Mao Zedong hated with passion and venom. Leonard:

A few hours ago, I stood at the address 76 Xingye Road, in front of the Shanghai building where the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party met in July 1920. To my left loomed "Corporate Avenue" -- a complex of office towers erected by a Hong Kong-headquartered real estate developer that for the last 15 years has been relentlessly transforming the neighborhood around this hallowed ground into an entertainment-and-dining mecca now called Xintiandi. One of the poorest neighborhoods in Shanghai, the CFO of the developer's China-based subsidiary told us with pride, was now one of the city's most expensive to live in. 

Yet the Chinese people that Leonard, I and the other journalists talked to on our trip see little if any contradiction. Mao desired improvement for the working class, they say, and his heirs are spectacularly delivering it. Modern China's philosophy seems to be not Marxism but utilitarianism, which says that those actions are most moral which most increase happiness and prosperity for the most people. I doubt Marx would be happy, not least because he thought utilitarianism apostle Jeremy Bentham was a jerk. Nor, I suspect, is China's dynamic of thesis (communism), antithesis (capitalism) and synthesis (the state as market-oriented corporation) the kind of dialectic that Mao had in mind.

But as an argument success usually trumps all others. China has plenty of that.