This is true, and such humility/pragmatism is pretty much the core idea of one kind of conservatism. But I'm also not sure how much we should read these people

This is true, and such humility/pragmatism is pretty much the core idea of one kind of conservatism. But I'm also not sure how much we should read these people's labelling of themselves as Marxists as indicating an opinion on the economic planning/freedom scale. Maybe the right analogy is something like Jesuits objecting to how Spain was abusing/enslaving native americans. Being Christian was an important part of how everyone involved thought about themselves, and such criticisms would inevitably have been phrased in christian terminology, that was the shared language of both power and protest. But that's not what the message was. > Peking University’s young Marxists drew the government’s ire after they campaigned for workers’ rights and openly criticized social inequality and corruption in China.