About This Site

This is an independent English-language mirror of marxism.cass.cn, the website of the Institute for Marxism Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). The official English presence of CASS covers only a fraction of the scholarship published in Chinese. This site machine-translates the full corpus and makes it searchable.

Not affiliated with CASS. For educational and research purposes only.

What is CASS?

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is China's premier state institution for research in the humanities and social sciences. Its Institute for Marxism Studies publishes theoretical, historical, and policy-oriented scholarship on Marxist theory, political economy, Chinese Communist Party history, and contemporary socialist governance. The institute's work is a primary site for understanding how Marxist concepts are developed, applied, and contested within the official Chinese intellectual tradition.

Methodology

Crawling

Articles are discovered and downloaded using a breadth-first crawler (scraper/crawl.py) that starts from the site's section roots and follows internal links. The site is geo-restricted to mainland China, so crawling must be run locally from within China or via a Chinese IP. Article URLs, dead links, and crawl state are tracked across runs so the crawler can be interrupted and resumed. Raw article content (title, author, date, body text) is extracted from the HTML and stored as JSON.

Translation

Each article is translated using Google Gemini 3 Flash Preview via the OpenRouter API. Gemini was chosen after comparing outputs from several models (including Claude Sonnet and Claude Haiku) for quality, consistency of political and Marxist terminology, and cost. See the model comparison notes for details.

The translation prompt includes a terminology glossary enforcing consistent renderings of key CPC and Marxist terms (e.g. 新时代 → "New Era", 八项规定 → "the Eight-Point Regulations", 中国式现代化 → "Chinese-path modernization"). Long articles are translated in segments to avoid output truncation. The model is also instructed to produce numbered endnotes for cultural allusions, classical idioms, CPC internal terminology, and historical references that would be opaque to readers with a Western Marxist background but no familiarity with Chinese political culture.

What is and isn't changed

Translations are presented as-is from the model. No editorial review is applied beyond automated quality checks. The selection of articles reflects what CASS publishes — this site does not curate, filter, or editorialize. Source links to the original Chinese are included on every article page.

Machine translation of specialized political and theoretical text is imperfect. Terminology may be inconsistently rendered, nuance may be lost, and the model may occasionally misread technical passages. Always verify against the original Chinese for critical use.

Updates

The corpus is updated periodically by re-running the crawler and translator locally, then committing the new translated JSON files. Cloudflare Pages rebuilds and redeploys the site automatically on each push.

Source code

The crawler, translation pipeline, and this site are open source: github.com/mitchlillie/cass-marxist-english