History of Chinese Philosophy/Chapter 19

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History of Chinese Philosophy

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Chapter 19: Philosophy in the PRC I — Marxist Orthodoxy and Its Challenges (1949–1976)

1. Dialectical Materialism as State Philosophy

The establishment of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, marked a transformation in the relationship between philosophy and political power that was without precedent in the long history of Chinese thought. For the first time in Chinese history, a single philosophical system — dialectical materialism (辩证唯物主义, bianzheng weiwu zhuyi) and historical materialism (历史唯物主义, lishi weiwu zhuyi) — was established as the official state philosophy, and all other philosophical traditions were relegated to the status of historical relics to be studied, critiqued, and ultimately superseded. Philosophy was no longer understood as an open-ended inquiry into the nature of reality, knowledge, and value, conducted by independent scholars and subject to the norms of rational argument and evidence, but as a component of the ideological superstructure whose function was to serve the interests of the proletarian revolution as defined by the Chinese Communist Party.

The institutional framework for the new philosophical order was established rapidly. In the universities, departments of philosophy were reorganized to center on the study of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and the teaching of Western philosophy and Chinese traditional philosophy was subordinated to the Marxist framework. Philosophy textbooks were rewritten — often following Soviet models — to present the history of philosophy as a struggle between materialism and idealism, between progressive and reactionary forces, with dialectical materialism as the culmination and synthesis of all previous philosophical development. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (中国科学院, Zhongguo Kexueyuan), established in 1949, and its successor the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中国社会科学院, Zhongguo Shehui Kexueyuan), established in 1977, served as the primary institutions for philosophical research, and their journals — particularly Zhexue yanjiu (哲学研究, Philosophical Research), founded in 1955 — became the principal venues for philosophical publication.

The philosophical content of the new orthodoxy was derived primarily from Soviet sources, particularly the textbooks of dialectical and historical materialism produced under Stalin's direction. The most influential of these was the chapter on "Dialectical and Historical Materialism" in the Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (1938), attributed to Stalin himself, which presented a codified version of Marxist philosophy organized around the "three laws of dialectics" — the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and the law of the negation of the negation — and the theory of historical materialism as a science of social development governed by objective laws. This Soviet codification of Marxist philosophy was translated into Chinese and became the standard reference for philosophical education throughout the 1950s.

The adoption of Soviet philosophical orthodoxy had several important consequences for the development of philosophy in China. First, it established a rigid framework of philosophical categories — materialism versus idealism, dialectics versus metaphysics, progressive versus reactionary — that was applied mechanically to the evaluation of all philosophical positions, past and present. Every philosopher in the history of Chinese thought was classified as either a materialist or an idealist, and the value of their work was assessed according to which side of this dichotomy they fell on. This reductive framework produced some scholarly absurdities — the attempt to classify Confucius as a "progressive" or "reactionary" thinker, the effort to identify "materialist" elements in the philosophy of Zhuangzi — but it also generated a vast body of research on the social and historical contexts of Chinese philosophical thought that, whatever its ideological biases, contributed to a deeper understanding of the material conditions in which Chinese philosophy developed.

2. The "Hundred Flowers" and Philosophical Debate (1956–1957)

The brief but significant period of intellectual liberalization known as the "Hundred Flowers" campaign (百花运动, baihua yundong) — Mao Zedong's 1956 call to "let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend" (百花齐放, 百家争鸣, baihua qifang, baijia zhengming) — produced a remarkable flourishing of philosophical debate that revealed both the vitality of Chinese philosophical life beneath the surface of official orthodoxy and the severe constraints within which that vitality operated.

The philosophical significance of the Hundred Flowers period lay in the unprecedented openness with which Chinese intellectuals debated fundamental questions about the nature of Marxist philosophy, its relationship to Chinese tradition, and the proper role of philosophy in a socialist society. For a brief period, philosophers were encouraged to raise questions, voice criticisms, and propose alternative interpretations that would have been unthinkable under the strict ideological controls of the early 1950s.

Among the most important philosophical debates of this period was the discussion of the "problem of the negation of the negation" (否定之否定, fouding zhi fouding) — one of the three laws of dialectics in the standard Soviet codification. Some Chinese philosophers, influenced by Mao's apparent downgrading of this law in "On Contradiction" (where it is not mentioned as a fundamental law), questioned whether the negation of the negation should be regarded as a universal law of dialectics or merely as a special case applicable to certain types of development. This seemingly technical question had profound implications: if the negation of the negation — the idea that development proceeds through a spiral of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis — was not a universal law, then the orthodox Soviet codification of dialectics was incomplete or incorrect, and the door was opened to alternative formulations of Marxist philosophy.

Another significant debate concerned the scope of dialectical materialism itself. Some philosophers, notably Feng Ding (冯定, 1902–1983), argued that Marxist philosophy should not be confined to abstract metaphysical questions about the nature of matter and consciousness but should engage with the concrete existential concerns of individual human beings — questions of happiness, meaning, suffering, and death. Feng Ding's Gongchandang yuan de renshengguan (共产党员的人生观, The Communist's Philosophy of Life, 1956) argued that a genuine Marxist philosophy of life must address the full range of human experience, including its tragic and ambiguous dimensions, rather than reducing all questions to matters of class struggle and economic development. This humanistic interpretation of Marxism anticipated by several decades the debates about "Marxist humanism" (马克思主义人道主义, Makesi zhuyi rendao zhuyi) that would play a central role in the intellectual life of the reform era.

Another important area of philosophical debate during the Hundred Flowers period concerned the historiography of Chinese philosophy itself — the question of how the Chinese philosophical tradition should be studied and interpreted from a Marxist perspective. The dominant approach, derived from Soviet models and promoted by Zhdanov's 1947 speech on the history of philosophy, treated the history of philosophy as a "struggle between materialism and idealism" (唯物主义与唯心主义的斗争, weiwu zhuyi yu weixin zhuyi de douzheng) in which materialist philosophers represented the progressive forces of society and idealist philosophers represented the reactionary forces. During the Hundred Flowers period, several scholars questioned this binary framework, arguing that it was too reductive to capture the complexity of the Chinese philosophical tradition and that many Chinese philosophers — particularly those in the Confucian tradition — could not be meaningfully classified as either materialists or idealists. The philosopher Ren Jiyu (任继愈, 1916–2009), who would later become one of the most important historians of Chinese Buddhist philosophy, argued for a more nuanced approach to the history of Chinese thought that recognized the distinctive characteristics of Chinese philosophical categories rather than forcing them into Western-derived schemata.

The aesthetics debate of 1956–1957 also deserves mention as a significant philosophical development of the Hundred Flowers period. Four principal positions emerged in this debate: Cai Yi (蔡仪, 1906–1992) argued that beauty is an objective property of things, rooted in their material characteristics; Zhu Guangqian (朱光潜, 1897–1986) argued that beauty arises from the interaction between the objective properties of things and the subjective responses of the perceiver; Lü Yingzhong (吕荧, 1915–1969) argued that beauty is entirely subjective, a product of human consciousness; and Li Zehou (李泽厚), then a young philosopher in his twenties, proposed a position that combined elements of the objectivist and subjectivist approaches, arguing that beauty is the product of the historical process of "the humanization of nature" through labor — a position that would become the foundation of his influential aesthetic philosophy in the reform era. The aesthetics debate was significant not only for its philosophical content but also for its demonstration that genuine philosophical disagreement and creative philosophical thinking were possible within the framework of Chinese Marxism, at least during periods of relative political relaxation.

The Hundred Flowers period came to an abrupt and devastating end in the summer of 1957, when Mao, apparently alarmed by the severity and scope of the criticisms that had been voiced, launched the "Anti-Rightist Campaign" (反右运动, fanyou yundong). Intellectuals who had spoken out during the Hundred Flowers period were denounced as "rightists" (右派, youpai), stripped of their positions, and subjected to public humiliation, imprisonment, or exile to labor camps. The philosophical consequences were devastating: many of the most creative and independent-minded philosophers in China were silenced for years or decades, and the culture of open philosophical debate that had briefly emerged during the Hundred Flowers period was destroyed. The lesson was clear: philosophical inquiry was permitted only within the boundaries defined by political authority, and those boundaries could shift without warning.

3. The Philosophy of Practice Debate

The most philosophically significant intellectual discussion of the 1960s — and one of the most important philosophical debates in the history of the People's Republic — was the debate over the "philosophy of practice" (实践哲学, shijian zhexue) that erupted in the pages of Chinese philosophical journals in the early 1960s. This debate, which ostensibly concerned the correct interpretation of Mao Zedong's "On Practice," was in fact a wide-ranging discussion about the fundamental nature of Marxist epistemology, the relationship between subject and object, and the role of human agency in the process of knowing and transforming reality.

The debate was triggered by a 1961 article by Yang Xianzhen (杨献珍, 1896–1992), a veteran Marxist philosopher and the president of the Central Party School, who argued for the concept of "the identity of thinking and being" (思维与存在的同一性, siwei yu cunzai de tongyixing). Yang maintained that the relationship between consciousness and reality was one of fundamental identity — that thought, properly conducted, reflects reality accurately and completely, and that the distinctions between subject and object, mind and matter, are ultimately overcome in the process of correct knowing. This position, Yang argued, was consistent with both Engels's formulation of the "basic question of philosophy" — the question of the relationship between thinking and being — and with Mao's emphasis on the unity of theory and practice in "On Practice."

Yang Xianzhen's position was challenged by a group of philosophers who argued that the concept of "identity" obscured the fundamental distinction between consciousness and material reality — the distinction that, they maintained, was the foundation of all materialist philosophy. If thinking and being were identical, they argued, then there was no meaningful difference between materialism and idealism, and the entire philosophical foundation of Marxism would collapse. The correct position, these critics maintained, was that consciousness reflects reality but is not identical with it — that the relationship between thinking and being is one of correspondence or approximation rather than identity.

This seemingly abstract debate had immediate political implications. Yang Xianzhen was closely associated with the more moderate, pragmatic wing of the Party leadership, and his philosophical emphasis on the identity of thinking and being could be read as a justification for pragmatic, evidence-based policy-making — the position that correct policies must be grounded in an accurate understanding of objective reality. His opponents, who emphasized the gap between consciousness and reality, were associated with the more radical, voluntarist wing of the Party that stressed the transformative power of revolutionary consciousness — the capacity of correct ideology to overcome material constraints and reshape reality in accordance with revolutionary will. The debate about the relationship between thinking and being was, in effect, a philosophical proxy for the political debate between pragmatists and radicals that would culminate in the Cultural Revolution.

Yang Xianzhen's defeat in this debate — he was criticized, removed from his position, and eventually imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution — demonstrated the degree to which philosophical positions in the People's Republic were evaluated not on their intellectual merits but on their perceived political implications. The triumph of the voluntarist position — the insistence that revolutionary consciousness could transform reality regardless of material conditions — provided the philosophical justification for the radical policies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, with their catastrophic consequences.

4. The Cultural Revolution and the Politicization of Philosophy (1966–1976)

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (无产阶级文化大革命, Wuchan Jieji Wenhua Da Geming, 1966–1976) represented the most extreme and most destructive episode in the political instrumentalization of philosophy in Chinese history. During the Cultural Revolution, philosophy was reduced entirely to a weapon of political struggle, and the last vestiges of intellectual autonomy and scholarly independence were systematically destroyed. Philosophers were persecuted, philosophical works were burned or banned, philosophy departments were closed or reorganized, and the practice of philosophy was redefined as an activity of political mobilization and ideological warfare rather than of rational inquiry and scholarly debate.

The Cultural Revolution was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 as a campaign to purge the Communist Party and Chinese society of "capitalist roaders" (走资派, zouzipai) and "class enemies" who, Mao believed, had infiltrated the Party and the state apparatus and were leading China away from the revolutionary path and toward a restoration of capitalism. The philosophical justification for the Cultural Revolution was provided by Mao's theory of "continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat" (无产阶级专政下继续革命, wuchan jieji zhuanzheng xia jixu geming) — the argument that class struggle does not end with the socialist revolution but continues throughout the period of socialist construction, as remnants of the old exploiting classes and new bourgeois elements within the Party itself continue to resist the revolutionary transformation of society.

The impact of the Cultural Revolution on philosophical life was catastrophic. Virtually every major philosopher in China was subjected to political persecution. Feng Youlan was forced to participate in political campaigns against Confucianism. He Lin, the Hegelian idealist, was stripped of his academic positions. Feng Ding, who had argued for a humanistic Marxism during the Hundred Flowers period, was denounced and persecuted. Yang Xianzhen, who had lost the "philosophy of practice" debate, was imprisoned. Many lesser-known philosophers were sent to the countryside for "labor reform" (劳动改造, laodong gaizao) or to the notorious "May Seventh Cadre Schools" (五七干校, wuqi ganxiao), where intellectuals were subjected to physical labor and political indoctrination.

Philosophical education was disrupted for more than a decade. Universities were closed from 1966 to 1970, and when they reopened, philosophy departments were staffed largely by politically selected "worker-peasant-soldier students" (工农兵学员, gongnongbing xueyuan) with minimal academic training. Philosophical journals ceased publication. Libraries were ransacked. Research was suspended. The accumulated philosophical knowledge of centuries — both Chinese and Western — was declared to be the product of "feudal" or "bourgeois" ideology and was subjected to wholesale condemnation.

The specific philosophical doctrine that served as the theoretical engine of the Cultural Revolution was Mao's theory of "one divides into two" (一分为二, yi fen wei er) — the principle that every entity, every process, and every idea contains within itself an internal contradiction that can and must be identified and struggled against. This doctrine, which Mao articulated against Yang Xianzhen's rival formulation of "two combine into one" (合二而一, he er er yi) in the 1964 debate that preceded the Cultural Revolution, was used to justify the relentless search for class enemies within every institution, every organization, and every individual. If every unity contains a contradiction, then every apparently loyal Communist may harbor a secret class enemy within — and it is the task of revolutionary vigilance to uncover and destroy this hidden enemy. The philosophical doctrine of "one divides into two" thus provided the theoretical rationale for the paranoid and destructive politics of the Cultural Revolution, in which colleagues denounced colleagues, students attacked teachers, and children turned against parents in the name of exposing the class contradictions that supposedly lurked within every relationship and every institution.

The philosophical activity that did occur during the Cultural Revolution consisted primarily of the study and application of Mao Zedong's philosophical works — particularly "On Practice," "On Contradiction," and the essays collected in the Little Red Book (毛主席语录, Mao Zhuxi yulu) — and the composition of political polemics in which philosophical vocabulary was used to attack political opponents. The most characteristic philosophical genre of the Cultural Revolution was the "big-character poster" (大字报, dazibao), in which individuals or groups used the language of dialectical materialism — "contradictions," "class struggle," "the principal aspect" — to accuse their rivals of philosophical errors that were simultaneously political crimes. Philosophy was reduced to a vocabulary of denunciation, and the philosophical categories that had been developed to illuminate reality were transformed into instruments for distorting and concealing it.

5. "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius" (1973–1974)

The "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius" campaign (批林批孔运动, pi Lin pi Kong yundong) of 1973–1974 was the most sustained and most philosophically elaborated of the Cultural Revolution's political campaigns, and it represented a revealing, if deeply distorted, engagement with the Chinese philosophical tradition. The campaign, initiated by Mao Zedong and promoted by the radical "Gang of Four" (四人帮, siren bang), was ostensibly directed against two targets: Lin Biao (林彪, 1907–1971), the former designated successor to Mao who had allegedly died in a plane crash in September 1971 while fleeing China after a failed coup attempt, and Confucius (孔子, Kongzi), who was presented as the philosophical archetype of reactionary, restorationist thought.

The linking of Lin Biao and Confucius — two figures separated by more than two millennia — was philosophically absurd but politically calculated. The campaign served several purposes simultaneously: it provided a framework for the posthumous denunciation of Lin Biao, whose treachery was explained as the product of his devotion to Confucian values of hierarchy and restoration; it provided a vehicle for continuing the Cultural Revolution's attack on traditional Chinese culture and its Confucian foundations; and it provided a philosophical justification for the radical political agenda of the Gang of Four, who used the anti-Confucian rhetoric to attack their political rivals — particularly the pragmatic premier Zhou Enlai (周恩来, 1898–1976), who was implicitly identified with Confucian moderation and compromise.

The campaign produced a vast body of pseudo-philosophical literature — articles, pamphlets, study materials, and political commentaries — in which the history of Chinese philosophy was reinterpreted through the lens of class struggle and the Confucian tradition was subjected to systematic denunciation. Confucius was portrayed as a reactionary aristocrat who sought to restore the slave-owning society of the Western Zhou dynasty against the progressive forces of the rising landlord class. The Legalist philosophers — Han Fei, Li Si, Shang Yang — were celebrated as progressive thinkers who advocated reform and social change against the Confucian defense of the status quo. The entire history of Chinese philosophy was rewritten as a "struggle between the Confucian and the Legalist lines" (儒法斗争, Ru Fa douzheng), with the Confucians consistently representing the forces of reaction and the Legalists consistently representing the forces of progress.

This Legalist-Confucian framework was historically simplistic and intellectually dishonest, but it nevertheless produced some lasting, if unintended, consequences for the study of Chinese philosophy. The campaign generated unprecedented public interest in Chinese philosophical history, and the study materials produced for mass consumption — however tendentious — introduced millions of Chinese citizens to philosophical ideas and historical figures that they might never have encountered otherwise. More importantly, the campaign stimulated a new wave of research on Legalist philosophy that produced some genuine scholarly contributions, even within the constraints of the campaign's ideological framework.

The philosopher who was most deeply affected by the campaign — and who would become the most controversial philosophical figure of the Cultural Revolution period — was Feng Youlan (冯友兰), who had been one of the greatest Chinese philosophers of the twentieth century. Under intense political pressure, Feng participated actively in the campaign, writing articles that denounced Confucius and praised the Legalists and that contradicted positions he had held throughout his philosophical career. Feng's participation in the campaign — whether motivated by fear, opportunism, or a genuine if misguided effort to preserve some role for philosophy in a society that was destroying it — remained a source of controversy and regret for the rest of his life and raised troubling questions about the relationship between philosophical integrity and political survival that continue to haunt the Chinese philosophical community.

6. The Near-Destruction of Philosophical Inquiry

The cumulative effect of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution on Chinese philosophical life was devastating — a near-destruction of the institutional, intellectual, and human resources that are essential for the practice of philosophy. By the time of Mao Zedong's death on September 9, 1976, and the arrest of the Gang of Four on October 6, 1976, Chinese philosophy had been reduced to a condition of intellectual desolation that would require decades of effort to overcome.

The human cost was incalculable. An entire generation of philosophers — the generation that had been trained in the 1940s and 1950s, that had absorbed both the Chinese philosophical tradition and the Western philosophical tradition, and that had possessed the intellectual resources to contribute to a creative synthesis of Chinese and Western thought — had been silenced, persecuted, or destroyed. Many of the most talented philosophers had died during the Cultural Revolution — some by suicide, some from the physical hardships of labor reform, some from the psychological torment of political persecution. Those who survived were often broken in health and spirit, and the decade or more that they had lost could never be recovered.

The institutional damage was equally severe. Philosophy departments had been dismantled or reduced to propaganda organs. Libraries had been pillaged. Research programs had been abandoned. International contacts had been severed. The journals, conferences, and scholarly networks that constitute the infrastructure of philosophical life had been destroyed. The training of new generations of philosophers had been interrupted for more than a decade, creating a gap in philosophical expertise that would take years to fill.

Perhaps most damaging of all was the intellectual legacy of three decades of philosophical instrumentalization. The subordination of philosophy to political authority had produced a culture of intellectual conformism and self-censorship that extended far beyond the formal requirements of political orthodoxy. Philosophers had learned — through bitter and sometimes fatal experience — that independent thinking was dangerous, that originality was suspect, and that the safest course was to repeat the approved formulas in the approved language. This culture of intellectual timidity was not easily overcome even after the formal constraints of Cultural Revolution politics were lifted, and its effects continued to influence Chinese philosophical life for many years after 1976.

The tragedy of Chinese philosophy during the Mao era was not simply that philosophical inquiry was suppressed — suppression, after all, can be lifted, and suppressed ideas can reemerge. The deeper tragedy was that philosophy was corrupted — that the practice of philosophical thinking itself was distorted by its subordination to political power, and that the habits of intellectual honesty, critical inquiry, and open debate that are essential to genuine philosophical activity were systematically undermined. The recovery of Chinese philosophy after 1976 required not only the restoration of institutions and the rehabilitation of individuals but the more difficult and more fundamental task of recovering the intellectual virtues — curiosity, independence, rigor, honesty — without which philosophy cannot exist.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the philosophical life of the People's Republic during the Mao era was entirely barren. Even in the most oppressive periods, individual philosophers continued to think independently and to develop original ideas, even if they could not publish or discuss them openly. The philosophical debates of the 1950s and early 1960s — however constrained by political orthodoxy — produced genuine philosophical insights and trained a generation of philosophers who would play important roles in the intellectual renaissance of the reform era. And the very intensity of the engagement with Marxist philosophy — however politicized and distorted — ensured that Chinese philosophers developed a deep familiarity with the Marxist philosophical tradition that would prove valuable in the more open intellectual environment that followed Mao's death. The seeds of philosophical renewal were present even in the darkest period of Chinese philosophical history, waiting for the political spring that would allow them to germinate.