Liu Guoguang, a once influential but long retired Marxist economist, recently burst back onto the scene with an incendiary warning for the Chinese government. If it did not rein in market reforms and deal with the growing, gaping rich-poor divide, China would “change its colour”: code for the “red” Communist party losing power.

Mr Liu is not the first planned-economy throwback to rage against the market during China’s quarter-century of liberalisation but very few have received as much attention. Almost overnight, symposiums were staged around the country to study his “economic thought”, including one at Ya’nan, the Communist party’s old revolutionary base.