"If at age 20 you are not a Communist..."
I have a lot more sympathy for those who were attracted by communism in the 1930s than for those still pushing it in one form or another after seventy bloody, poverty-stricken years of evidence.
I don't think the issue in the East (China for example) is the lack of academia, which is not the case, but that China has, in its thousands of year, ever entertained the idea that somehow their culture and nation is inferior to all others. I doubt they're going to start now.