[citation needed] The recovery and publication of Gu's prison diaries and theoretical writings caused a sensation in intellectual circles when published in the mid 1990s.
Having spent his life as a highly trained economist with Marxist convictions and heroic career as a revolutionary, his fall from grace and savage punishment led him to develop an authentic and deeply personal conversion to the values of liberal democracy.
However, having given outspoken and unwelcome advice to senior cadres, he was in 1952 charged with counter-revolutionary tendencies, demoted and sentenced to "remoulding."
Rehabilitated in a brief period of political relaxation in the early 1960s, he was rescued from his pariah status by the economist Sun Yefang, with whom he had been associated in the Shanghai underground movement.
Marx had predicted inevitable demise of capitalism, on the grounds that: The reason for capitalism's great vitality is, apart from new technology, products and materials; and big companies, governments and trade union; and in addition to its pluralistic philosophy, academic freedom and democratic politics, is that it did not limit, but tried to develop critique.