Inspired by China, Britain’s communists dream of revolution for social and political change

Above the steel doorway to Ben Chacko’s office in Hackney Wick, a stone’s throw from London’s Olympic Park, are two Soviet-style red stars. Perched atop his desk is a bust of Vladimir Lenin. But do not let that persuade you that the 34-year-old’s loyalties rest with the Kremlin.

“The regime, the corruption, the authori­tarian­ism of modern Russia is not something that appeals to the communist West at all,” insists the editor of the Morning Star, the only English-language socialist national daily newspaper in the world.

Chacko’s affections “lie with Beijing, not Moscow”, as The Economist maga­zine put it in 2015, the year he was appointed editor. He read Mandarin at Oxford, with six months’ study at Peking University, before returning to China to spend three years teaching English and interpreting in Dalian, Liaoning province, and Ningbo, Zhejiang province.

The love affair started at 15, when he “was a teenage leftie and got into the whole Maoism thing”. His flirtation with Mao Zedong, he says, “was more a brief teenage phase”, but the passion for Chinese politics, history and culture has endured. During his travels, he was wowed by what he calls “a much more optimistic and friendly country than Britain, and anywhere in the West, really”.

“The striking impression I have of Chinese society,” he says, “is that it has a very can-do attitude to political, environmental and economic problems. While our politicians usually seem to be making excuses for why things can’t change, in China, everything is changing very fast, and there’s a very real sense that tomorrow will be better than today. I found a very infec­tious enthusiasm.”