BEIJING — Regal orchestral music strikes up, a computer-animated train races by and an old man with a bushy white beard looms onto the television screen. Then the studio audience applauds as an effervescent host opens an episode of China’s latest prime-time entertainment.

It looks like another Chinese talk show, but the bearded man is Karl Marx. This is “Marx Got It Right,” a slickly produced program that is part talk show, part indoctrination session — and a vivid illustration of the quirky efforts that the Communist Party under Xi Jinping is making to win over China’s millennials.

Saturday was the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, and Mr. Xi, trying to reassert the Communist Party’s dominance over an increasingly complex society, has used the occasion to call for renewed devotion to the founding tenets of Communism. He gave a big speech on Friday, days after visiting Peking University, where he also stressed Marxist education.

“No idea or theory in the history of human thought has produced a broader or deeper impact than Marxism,” Mr. Xi said to thousands of officials in the Great Hall of the People. He called Marx “the greatest thinker in modern times.”