CHINA

Party School Learns About Capitalism: China’s Communist Party School, once a bastion of Marxist ideological purity amid capitalist-style reforms, has opened its gates to the former enemy with a course on the stock market. The People’s Daily reported last week that the school, where top officials are indoctrinated, invited a Chinese-American merchant banker to lecture more than 1,000 of the school’s elite Dec. 18 as part of the course. It was an event the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung would have abhorred, but one that reformist paramount leader Deng Xiaoping thoroughly condones. The stock course was introduced after Deng mandated that Marxism-Leninism should be more practical, the newspaper said.