History of Chinese Philosophy/Chapter 18

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History of Chinese Philosophy

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Chapter 18: Marxist Philosophy in China and Mao Zedong Thought

1. The Reception of Marxism-Leninism in China

The introduction of Marxist philosophy into China was one of the most consequential intellectual events of the twentieth century, transforming not only the political landscape of the nation but also the fundamental terms in which Chinese intellectuals understood history, society, and the nature of philosophical inquiry itself. Unlike the gradual and largely academic reception of other Western philosophical traditions — pragmatism, idealism, logical positivism — the reception of Marxism was inseparable from the political crises that convulsed China in the early decades of the Republic, and its adoption was driven as much by the perceived failure of liberal democratic models as by the intrinsic persuasiveness of Marxist philosophical arguments.

The earliest encounters with Marxist ideas in China predated the Russian Revolution of 1917, but they were fragmentary and unsystematic. Isolated passages from Marx and Engels had been translated or summarized in Chinese journals since the last years of the Qing dynasty. Liang Qichao (梁启超) had briefly mentioned Marx in his 1902 essay on the evolution of modern academic thought, and the anarchist Liu Shipei (刘师培, 1884–1919) had drawn on certain Marxist concepts in his critique of private property. Sun Yat-sen's "Principle of People's Livelihood" (民生主义, minsheng zhuyi) bore a superficial resemblance to socialist ideas, though Sun explicitly rejected Marxist class struggle. But these early encounters were scattered and lacked philosophical depth — Marx was understood primarily as one among many Western social theorists rather than as the founder of a comprehensive philosophical system.

The decisive event in the reception of Marxism in China was the Russian Revolution of October 1917, which demonstrated — or appeared to demonstrate — that Marxist theory could be translated into revolutionary practice and that a backward, largely agricultural country could bypass the capitalist stage of development and proceed directly to socialism. For Chinese intellectuals who had been disillusioned by the failure of the 1911 revolution, the corruption of the early Republic, the betrayal of Chinese interests at Versailles in 1919, and the apparent inability of Western-style liberalism to solve China's problems, the Russian Revolution offered a compelling alternative model of modernization — one that combined theoretical sophistication with revolutionary energy, that promised rapid industrialization without the social injustices of capitalism, and that presented itself as an anti-imperialist force aligned with the aspirations of colonized and semi-colonized peoples.

The intellectual ferment of the May Fourth period (1919) provided the environment in which Marxism could take root in Chinese soil. The May Fourth Movement's radical critique of traditional Chinese culture — its rejection of Confucian hierarchies, its embrace of science and democracy, its insistence on the need for comprehensive social transformation — created a receptive audience for Marxist ideas about class struggle, historical materialism, and revolutionary change. At the same time, the movement's disillusionment with Western liberal democracy — intensified by the Versailles settlement, which transferred German colonial possessions in Shandong to Japan rather than returning them to China — pushed many intellectuals toward a more radical critique of both Chinese tradition and Western capitalism. Marxism offered precisely such a critique: it explained the failure of Western liberalism as a consequence of the inherent contradictions of capitalism and promised a new social order that would transcend both traditional Chinese feudalism and modern Western imperialism.

The first major debate about Marxism in China — the famous "Problems versus Isms" controversy (问题与主义, wenti yu zhuyi) of 1919 — already revealed the fundamental tension that would characterize the reception of Marxism throughout the twentieth century: the tension between treating Marxism as a universal philosophical system to be applied to Chinese conditions and treating it as a practical tool to be adapted to the specific requirements of Chinese society. Hu Shi (胡适, 1891–1962), drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, argued against the adoption of any comprehensive "ism" — whether liberalism, anarchism, or Marxism — and insisted that China's problems should be addressed one by one through empirical investigation and incremental reform. Li Dazhao (李大钊, 1889–1927), who would become one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, countered that individual problems could not be solved in isolation from the systemic structures that produced them and that China needed a comprehensive theoretical framework — a "fundamental solution" (根本解决, genben jiejue) — to guide its transformation.

2. Li Dazhao and the Voluntarist Interpretation of Marxism

Li Dazhao (李大钊, 1889–1927) was the first significant Chinese intellectual to embrace Marxism as a comprehensive philosophical worldview and the first to attempt a systematic interpretation of Marxist theory in the Chinese context. Li's reception of Marxism was distinctive in several respects that would profoundly influence the subsequent development of Marxist philosophy in China. Most importantly, Li emphasized the voluntarist and activist dimensions of Marxism — the role of human consciousness, moral commitment, and revolutionary will in the making of history — over the deterministic and economistic dimensions that dominated orthodox European Marxism.

Li Dazhao's interpretation of historical materialism was markedly different from the mechanical determinism that characterized much of European Marxism at the time. Where orthodox Marxists argued that history progresses through a series of stages determined by the development of the forces of production and that revolutionary change can occur only when the objective economic conditions are ripe, Li emphasized the creative role of human agency in the historical process. "The development of history," Li wrote, "is not a matter of passive waiting for the arrival of the inevitable; it is a matter of active struggle to create the new." This voluntarist emphasis — the insistence that consciousness can transform reality rather than merely reflecting it — was deeply rooted in the Chinese philosophical tradition, particularly in the Confucian emphasis on moral self-cultivation and the Neo-Confucian concept of the unity of knowledge and action (知行合一, zhixing heyi). Li Dazhao, perhaps unconsciously, was already engaged in the process of "sinicizing" Marxism by reading it through the lens of Chinese philosophical categories.

Li's interpretation of the Marxist concept of class was similarly adapted to Chinese conditions. Where European Marxism focused on the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary subject, Li argued that in China — where industrial workers constituted a tiny fraction of the population — the revolutionary subject was the Chinese nation as a whole, understood as a "proletarian nation" (无产阶级的民族, wuchan jieji de minzu) oppressed by the imperialist powers. This concept of the "proletarian nation" effectively transformed Marxist class analysis into a form of anti-imperialist nationalism, replacing the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat within a single society with the struggle between oppressed and oppressing nations on the world stage. This nationalization of Marxism was a crucial step in the adaptation of Marxist theory to Chinese conditions and anticipated by several decades the formal articulation of the "sinicization of Marxism" as an explicit theoretical program.

Li Dazhao's philosophical legacy was cut short by his execution in 1927 at the hands of the warlord Zhang Zuolin, but his influence on subsequent Chinese Marxism was profound. His voluntarist interpretation of historical materialism, his emphasis on the creative role of consciousness in the revolutionary process, and his adaptation of Marxist class analysis to the conditions of a semi-colonial agrarian society established the basic framework within which Mao Zedong and other Chinese Marxists would develop their own philosophical positions.

3. Qu Qiubai and Early Marxist Philosophy

Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白, 1899–1935) was the first Chinese Marxist to engage seriously with Marxist philosophy as a systematic intellectual endeavor rather than primarily as a guide to political action. A brilliant linguist and literary theorist who spent two years in Soviet Russia (1920–1922) and learned Russian to a high level of proficiency, Qu was uniquely positioned to serve as a mediator between Russian Marxist philosophy and the Chinese intellectual world. His translations and interpretations of Soviet Marxist philosophical texts — particularly the works of Plekhanov and Bukharin — introduced Chinese readers to the philosophical foundations of Marxism in a way that earlier, more politically oriented writings had not.

Qu Qiubai's most significant philosophical contribution was his effort to develop a Marxist theory of Chinese culture and language. In a series of essays written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Qu argued that the classical Chinese written language (文言文, wenyanwen) was not merely an archaic literary convention but a tool of class domination — a means by which the educated elite maintained its cultural hegemony over the illiterate masses. The reform of the Chinese language — its simplification, its alignment with spoken vernacular, and ultimately its romanization — was, for Qu, not merely a technical or educational question but a philosophical and political one: it was a question of liberating the Chinese people from the ideological structures embedded in their language and enabling them to think in new ways about their social reality.

Qu's philosophical writings also addressed the relationship between Marxist materialism and the Chinese philosophical tradition. He argued that elements of materialist thought could be found in the Chinese tradition — in the naturalism of the Daoists, in Wang Chong's (王充) critique of superstition, in the "qi-monism" (气一元论, qi yiyuanlun) of Zhang Zai (张载) — but that these elements had never been developed into a systematic materialist philosophy because of the dominance of Confucian idealism and its alliance with feudal political power. Marxist materialism, in Qu's view, represented the completion and fulfillment of the materialist tendencies that had been suppressed within the Chinese tradition — a reading of Chinese philosophical history that would become standard in Marxist historiography of Chinese philosophy for the next several decades.

Qu Qiubai's career was tragically brief. Captured by Nationalist forces in 1935, he was executed at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind a body of philosophical and literary work that, while fragmentary, demonstrated the intellectual potential of a genuinely philosophical engagement with Marxist theory in the Chinese context.

4. Ai Siqi and the Popularization of Dialectical Materialism

The philosopher who did more than any other single individual to make Marxist philosophy accessible to the Chinese reading public was Ai Siqi (艾思奇, 1910–1966), whose Dazhong zhexue (大众哲学, Philosophy for the Masses, 1934–1936) became the most widely read philosophical work in modern Chinese history. Originally published as a series of newspaper columns in the Shanghai-based Dushu shenghuo (读书生活, Reading Life) magazine, Philosophy for the Masses presented the fundamental principles of dialectical materialism in clear, accessible language, using examples drawn from everyday Chinese life to illustrate abstract philosophical concepts.

Ai Siqi's achievement was not merely pedagogical but genuinely philosophical. In translating the categories of dialectical materialism into accessible Chinese language and illustrating them with Chinese examples, Ai was engaged in a process of cultural translation that inevitably transformed the philosophical content of the ideas he was transmitting. His account of the dialectical relationship between opposites, for example, drew not only on the Hegelian and Marxist tradition but also on the Chinese philosophical tradition of yin and yang (阴阳) and the concept of complementary opposition that had been central to Chinese cosmological thought since antiquity. Similarly, his treatment of the relationship between theory and practice drew on the Chinese philosophical concept of the unity of knowledge and action (知行合一, zhixing heyi) as well as on the Marxist concept of praxis. Whether or not Ai was fully conscious of these cultural resonances, his work demonstrated that the reception of Marxist philosophy in China was not a passive process of importing a foreign ideology but an active process of cultural transformation in which both Marxism and the Chinese tradition were modified by their encounter.

Philosophy for the Masses also established a model for the relationship between philosophy and the people that would become central to the Chinese Marxist understanding of philosophical activity. Against the traditional Chinese (and Western) understanding of philosophy as an elite intellectual pursuit — the province of scholars, sages, and academicians — Ai Siqi argued that philosophy was not a specialized discipline accessible only to trained experts but a universal human activity that belonged to the people as a whole. "Philosophy is not something distant and mysterious," Ai wrote in the book's opening pages. "It exists in the simplest things in our daily lives." This democratization of philosophy — the insistence that philosophical understanding is the right and the capacity of ordinary people — was a direct expression of the Marxist commitment to overcoming the division between mental and manual labor and would become a central tenet of Maoist philosophical thought.

Ai Siqi's later career was spent at the Chinese Communist Party's ideological training institution in Yan'an and subsequently at the Central Party School in Beijing, where he served as one of the chief architects of the Party's philosophical education program. His textbooks and lectures shaped the philosophical understanding of several generations of Party cadres and established dialectical materialism as the official philosophical framework of the Chinese Communist state. While his later writings were more doctrinaire and less philosophically creative than his early work, his influence on the philosophical culture of the People's Republic was immense and lasting.

5. Mao Zedong's "On Practice" and "On Contradiction"

Mao Zedong's (毛泽东, 1893–1976) two major philosophical essays — "On Practice" (实践论, Shijian lun, 1937) and "On Contradiction" (矛盾论, Maodun lun, 1937) — represent the most important Chinese contribution to Marxist philosophy and the most systematic expression of the philosophical foundations of what would later be called "Mao Zedong Thought" (毛泽东思想, Mao Zedong sixiang). Written during the Yan'an period, when Mao was consolidating his intellectual and political leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, these essays articulated a philosophical position that was simultaneously an interpretation of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, a contribution to the Chinese philosophical tradition, and a theoretical justification for Mao's own political strategy.

"On Practice" addresses the fundamental epistemological question of the relationship between knowledge and action, theory and practice. Mao begins with the Marxist premise that knowledge arises from productive practice — from human beings' active engagement with the material world in the process of production — and that the truth or falsity of knowledge can be verified only through practice. But Mao develops this premise in a distinctive direction by articulating a sophisticated dialectical theory of the knowledge process that goes significantly beyond the mechanical reflection theory (反映论, fanying lun) that characterized much of Soviet Marxist epistemology.

According to Mao, the process of knowing passes through two stages: the stage of perceptual knowledge (感性认识, ganxing renshi), in which the knower apprehends the external appearances and separate aspects of things through direct sensory experience, and the stage of rational knowledge (理性认识, lixing renshi), in which the knower grasps the internal connections, the essential nature, and the laws governing things through a "leap" (飞跃, feiyue) of conceptual understanding. But the process does not end with the attainment of rational knowledge. Rational knowledge must then be applied in practice, and this application constitutes a second "leap" — from theory back to practice — that both tests the validity of the theory and transforms the reality to which it is applied. This dialectical movement from practice to knowledge and from knowledge back to practice — and the progressive deepening of understanding that results from the repeated cycling through this process — constitutes, for Mao, the fundamental structure of human cognition.

The philosophical significance of "On Practice" lies not only in its epistemological content but also in its implicit engagement with the Chinese philosophical tradition. Mao's insistence on the unity of knowledge and action — his argument that knowledge divorced from practice is empty and that practice uninformed by theory is blind — echoes the classical Chinese philosophical debate about the relationship between zhi (知, "knowledge") and xing (行, "action") that had been a central preoccupation of Chinese philosophy since the Song dynasty. Wang Yangming's doctrine of the "unity of knowledge and action" (知行合一, zhixing heyi), Sun Yat-sen's theory that "action is easy, knowledge is difficult" (行易知难, xing yi zhi nan), and the broader Confucian emphasis on the practical, moral dimensions of knowledge all resonated with Mao's philosophical position, even though Mao presented his arguments in exclusively Marxist-Leninist terminology.

"On Contradiction" is a more ambitious and more original philosophical work. It addresses the fundamental ontological question of the nature of contradiction — the driving force of all change and development — and develops a theory of contradiction that modifies and extends the Marxist-Leninist dialectic in several important respects. Mao begins by affirming the Marxist principle that contradiction is universal — that it exists in all things and all processes — and that the "law of the unity of opposites" (对立统一规律, duili tongyi guilü) is the fundamental law of nature, society, and thought. But he then introduces a series of distinctions that give his theory of contradiction a richness and complexity absent from standard Soviet dialectics.

The most important of these distinctions is the distinction between the "principal contradiction" (主要矛盾, zhuyao maodun) and "secondary contradictions" (次要矛盾, ciyao maodun), and between the "principal aspect" (主要方面, zhuyao fangmian) and "secondary aspect" of a contradiction. In any complex process, Mao argues, there are many contradictions, but one of them is the principal contradiction whose development and resolution determines the development and resolution of the others. Similarly, in any single contradiction, one of the two opposing aspects is the principal aspect that determines the character of the contradiction as a whole. These distinctions allowed Mao to develop a theory of social analysis that was far more nuanced and flexible than the rigid class analysis of orthodox Marxism — a theory that could accommodate the shifting alliances and complex social dynamics of Chinese revolutionary politics.

Another crucial innovation in "On Contradiction" is Mao's concept of the "particularity of contradiction" (矛盾的特殊性, maodun de teshuxing) — the principle that each type of process has its own specific contradictions that distinguish it from all other processes and that these specific contradictions must be studied in their concrete particularity rather than subsumed under abstract universal categories. This concept was directly relevant to the political debate within the Chinese Communist Party about the applicability of Soviet models to Chinese conditions: by insisting on the particularity of contradiction, Mao was arguing, in philosophical terms, that Chinese revolutionary practice must be guided by an analysis of the specific contradictions of Chinese society rather than by a mechanical application of universal Marxist formulas derived from the experience of European or Russian revolutions.

6. The Sinicization of Marxism

The concept of the "sinicization of Marxism" (马克思主义中国化, Makesi zhuyi Zhongguohua) — the adaptation of Marxist theory to the specific conditions and cultural traditions of Chinese society — was first explicitly articulated by Mao Zedong in his report to the Sixth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee in October 1938. "There is no such thing as abstract Marxism," Mao declared, "but only concrete Marxism. What we call concrete Marxism is Marxism that has taken on a national form, that is, Marxism applied to the concrete struggle in the concrete conditions prevailing in China, and not Marxism abstractly used... Consequently, the sinicization of Marxism — that is to say, making certain that in all of its manifestations it is imbued with Chinese characteristics, using it according to Chinese peculiarities — becomes a problem that must be understood and solved by the whole Party without delay."

The sinicization of Marxism was not merely a political strategy but a genuine philosophical problem — the problem of how a philosophical system developed in the specific historical and cultural context of nineteenth-century Europe could be meaningfully applied to a society with a radically different history, culture, and social structure. The Chinese Marxists' answer to this problem took several forms. At the most basic level, sinicization meant the adaptation of Marxist political strategy to Chinese conditions — the shift from an urban proletarian revolution to a peasant-based rural revolution, the development of the "mass line" (群众路线, qunzhong luxian) as a method of revolutionary leadership, and the incorporation of Chinese military traditions into the theory of people's war. But at a deeper level, sinicization involved a transformation of the philosophical categories of Marxism through their encounter with the Chinese intellectual tradition.

This transformation was evident in the distinctive features of Chinese Marxist philosophy: its emphasis on practice over theory, its voluntarist conception of the role of consciousness in historical change, its dialectical rather than mechanistic understanding of social development, and its insistence on the concrete and particular over the abstract and universal. All of these features can be traced to both Marxist and Chinese philosophical sources, and it is precisely in this fusion of the two traditions that the philosophical originality of Chinese Marxism lies.

The sinicization of Marxism also involved the reinterpretation of the Chinese philosophical tradition from a Marxist perspective. Chinese Marxist historians of philosophy — led by Hou Wailu (侯外庐, 1903–1987), whose monumental Zhongguo sixiang tongshi (中国思想通史, General History of Chinese Thought, 5 vols., 1947–1963) established the standard Marxist interpretation of Chinese intellectual history — reread the entire Chinese tradition through the lens of historical materialism, identifying "materialist" and "idealist" tendencies within it and interpreting the development of Chinese thought as a reflection of underlying class struggles and changes in the mode of production. While this Marxist historiography of Chinese philosophy was often reductive and tendentious, it also produced genuine insights into the social and economic contexts of Chinese philosophical thought and stimulated a new awareness of the relationship between ideas and material conditions that enriched the study of Chinese intellectual history.

7. Philosophy as Political Instrument

One of the most distinctive and most problematic features of Marxist philosophy in China was the intimate relationship between philosophical activity and political power. From the Yan'an period onward, philosophy in the Chinese Communist movement was understood not as an autonomous intellectual inquiry pursued for its own sake but as a weapon in the class struggle — a means of consolidating political unity, justifying political decisions, and mobilizing the masses for revolutionary action. This instrumentalization of philosophy had profound consequences for the development of philosophical thought in China, both positive and negative.

On the positive side, the Communist movement's emphasis on the practical relevance of philosophy produced a distinctive culture of philosophical engagement that was, in some respects, more vibrant and more democratic than the academic philosophy of the universities. The "rectification movements" (整风运动, zhengfeng yundong) that Mao initiated in Yan'an in 1942 — whatever their political purposes — involved genuine philosophical discussions about the relationship between theory and practice, the nature of correct thinking, and the methods of investigating social reality. The study sessions, criticism and self-criticism meetings, and philosophical debates that were central to Communist Party life created a form of collective philosophical practice that engaged people who would never have encountered formal philosophy in the traditional academic setting.

On the negative side, the subordination of philosophy to politics meant that philosophical inquiry was increasingly constrained by political orthodoxy, and philosophical disagreements were increasingly treated as political deviations. The "Yan'an Rectification Movement" (延安整风运动, Yan'an zhengfeng yundong) of 1942–1944 established the model: philosophical positions that challenged Mao's authority or deviated from his interpretation of Marxism were criticized not as intellectually mistaken but as politically dangerous — as expressions of "subjectivism" (主观主义, zhuguan zhuyi), "dogmatism" (教条主义, jiaotiao zhuyi), or "liberalism" (自由主义, ziyou zhuyi) that threatened the unity and discipline of the revolutionary movement. This conflation of philosophical disagreement with political deviance would become one of the defining — and most destructive — features of intellectual life in the People's Republic.

The relationship between Marxist philosophy and the broader Chinese philosophical tradition was complex and evolving. During the Yan'an period, Mao and his followers adopted a relatively positive attitude toward the Chinese philosophical tradition, drawing on it selectively to enrich and "sinicize" Marxist thought. Mao himself was a voracious reader of Chinese classical texts — the Zizhi tongjian (资治通鉴, Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government), the military writings of Sun Tzu, the philosophical works of the Legalists — and his political and philosophical writings are saturated with allusions to Chinese history and classical literature. This positive engagement with the Chinese tradition was, however, always selective and instrumental: elements of the tradition that could be used to support the revolutionary cause were embraced, while elements that contradicted Marxist principles or challenged revolutionary authority were rejected.

The philosophical legacy of the pre-1949 period of Chinese Marxism was thus deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, the engagement with Marxist philosophy produced genuine philosophical insights — Mao's theory of contradiction, the concept of the sinicization of Marxism, the emphasis on the dialectical relationship between theory and practice — that enriched both the Marxist tradition and the Chinese philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the instrumentalization of philosophy and the subordination of intellectual inquiry to political authority established patterns that would have devastating consequences for philosophical life in the People's Republic after 1949.