History of Chinese Philosophy/Chapter 20

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History of Chinese Philosophy

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Chapter 20: Philosophy in the PRC II — The Reform Era and Beyond (1976–present)

1. The "Criterion of Truth" Debate (1978)

The philosophical rebirth of the People's Republic of China began with a debate about truth. On May 11, 1978, the newspaper Guangming Daily (光明日报, Guangming Ribao) published an article entitled "Practice Is the Sole Criterion of Truth" (实践是检验真理的唯一标准, Shijian shi jianyan zhenli de weiyi biaozhun), authored by Hu Fuming (胡福明, born 1935), a philosophy professor at Nanjing University, though the article had been revised and approved by Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦, 1915–1989), then head of the Central Party School. This article, which drew on Mao Zedong's own "On Practice" to argue that the truth of any proposition — including the propositions of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought — must be tested against the results of practice rather than accepted on the authority of any individual or institution, triggered a national debate that would become the philosophical foundation of the reform era.

The "criterion of truth" debate (真理标准讨论, zhenli biaozhun taolun) was ostensibly a philosophical discussion about epistemology — about the nature of truth and the methods by which truth claims can be verified. But its political implications were revolutionary. The argument that practice is the sole criterion of truth was directly aimed at the "Two Whatevers" (两个凡是, liangge fanshi) position articulated by Mao's immediate successor, Hua Guofeng (华国锋, 1921–2008), who had declared that "whatever decisions Chairman Mao made, we will resolutely uphold; whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave, we will steadfastly obey." By insisting that all propositions — including those of Mao Zedong — must be tested against practice, the "criterion of truth" article challenged the cult of Mao and opened the way for the pragmatic, reform-oriented policies of Deng Xiaoping (邓小平, 1904–1997).

The philosophical significance of the debate extended far beyond its immediate political context. By reasserting the primacy of practice over dogma, the debate established a philosophical framework that permitted — indeed demanded — the critical examination of all received ideas, including the received ideas of Marxism-Leninism itself. This was not, to be sure, a rejection of Marxism; on the contrary, the argument was framed in explicitly Marxist terms, drawing on the authority of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao himself. But it was a rejection of the dogmatic and authoritarian interpretation of Marxism that had prevailed during the Cultural Revolution, and it opened the intellectual space within which Chinese philosophers could begin to engage critically with both their own tradition and the wider world of philosophical thought.

The debate also established a new understanding of the relationship between philosophy and politics that, while still far from the ideal of intellectual autonomy, represented a significant advance over the Cultural Revolution model. Philosophy was no longer understood primarily as a weapon of class struggle or an instrument of political mobilization but as a critical activity that could contribute to the rational formulation of policy and the improvement of social conditions. The phrase "seeking truth from facts" (实事求是, shishi qiushi) — drawn from the Confucian classic Book of Han (汉书, Hanshu) but appropriated by Mao Zedong as a Marxist slogan — became the philosophical motto of the reform era, symbolizing the commitment to pragmatic, evidence-based thinking that would characterize the new intellectual dispensation.

2. Revival of Chinese Philosophy as Academic Discipline

The reform era witnessed a dramatic revival of the study of Chinese philosophy as an academic discipline — a revival that involved not only the restoration of institutions and the rehabilitation of persecuted scholars but also a fundamental reconsideration of the nature, scope, and methods of Chinese philosophical study. The Marxist framework that had dominated the study of Chinese philosophy since 1949 — the rigid classification of philosophers as "materialists" or "idealists," the reduction of philosophical development to a reflection of class struggle, the teleological narrative that presented dialectical materialism as the culmination of all previous thought — was gradually loosened, and new approaches to the study of Chinese philosophy were permitted and eventually encouraged.

The institutional revival began in the late 1970s with the reopening of philosophy departments, the reestablishment of philosophical journals, and the rehabilitation of persecuted philosophers. Zhexue yanjiu (哲学研究, Philosophical Research) resumed publication in 1978 and quickly became a forum for the new philosophical discussions. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, established in 1977 as a separate institution from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, created a dedicated Institute of Philosophy (哲学研究所, Zhexue Yanjiusuo) that became the premier institution for philosophical research in China. New journals devoted to specific areas of philosophical study — Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, logic — were founded throughout the 1980s, reflecting the increasing specialization and professionalization of philosophical research.

The scholarly revival was accompanied by a reevaluation of the Chinese philosophical tradition that gradually freed the study of Chinese philosophy from the constraints of Marxist orthodoxy. Where the Marxist historiography of Chinese philosophy had treated the tradition primarily as an arena of class struggle between materialist and idealist tendencies, the new scholarship sought to understand Chinese philosophy on its own terms — to recover the internal logic and development of Chinese philosophical thought without reducing it to a reflection of underlying economic and social forces. This shift in approach was not a wholesale rejection of Marxist methodology — many Chinese scholars continued to find Marxist categories useful for understanding certain aspects of the Chinese tradition — but it was a significant expansion of the interpretive possibilities available to Chinese historians of philosophy.

One of the most important developments in the post-Mao study of Chinese philosophy was the recovery and reevaluation of the New Confucian tradition. Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi, and Xu Fuguan — who had been dismissed during the Mao era as "reactionary" thinkers serving the interests of imperialism and the Kuomintang — were gradually recognized as significant philosophers whose work warranted serious scholarly attention. The publication of their works in mainland China, beginning in the mid-1980s, introduced a new generation of Chinese scholars to a body of philosophical thought that was both deeply rooted in the Chinese tradition and engaged with the most fundamental questions of modern philosophy. The influence of the New Confucians on contemporary mainland Chinese philosophy has been profound and continues to grow.

3. Li Zehou and "Subjectality"

The most original and most influential Chinese philosopher of the reform era was Li Zehou (李泽厚, 1930–2021), whose wide-ranging philosophical work — spanning aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of history — represented the most sustained and creative philosophical effort of the post-Mao period. Li's philosophical project was nothing less than the construction of a comprehensive philosophical system that would synthesize the insights of Marxism, Kant, and the Chinese philosophical tradition into a new philosophical vision capable of addressing the fundamental questions of modernity.

Li Zehou's most influential concept was "subjectality" (主体性, zhutixing) — a term he coined to distinguish his concept from the Western philosophical concept of "subjectivity" (主观性, zhuguanxing). Where "subjectivity" refers to the inner, private, psychological dimension of individual experience, "subjectality" refers to the active, creative, world-transforming capacity of human beings as a species — the capacity to transform both the natural world and the human world through productive practice and cultural creation. Li's concept of subjectality was derived from a creative reading of Marx's concept of practice and Kant's concept of the transcendental subject, but it was also deeply influenced by the Chinese philosophical emphasis on the transformative power of human agency and the Confucian conviction that human beings are not merely passive recipients of their circumstances but active creators of their world.

Li Zehou's philosophical anthropology — his account of the nature and development of the human species — centered on the concept of "sedimentation" (积淀, jidian), which he used to describe the process by which the external, social, historical products of human practice are gradually internalized and become part of the psychological structure of the individual. Through the accumulated labor of countless generations, Li argued, the objective achievements of human civilization — tools, technologies, social institutions, cultural forms, scientific knowledge — are gradually transformed into subjective human capacities — skills, sensibilities, cognitive structures, aesthetic responses. This process of sedimentation is, for Li, the fundamental mechanism of human development: it is through sedimentation that the species-being (类本质, lei benzhi) of humanity is created and progressively enriched.

Li Zehou's aesthetic philosophy, developed most fully in his trilogy Pipan zhexue de pipan (批判哲学的批判, A Critique of Critical Philosophy, 1979), Meixue sijiang (美学四讲, Four Lectures on Aesthetics, 1989), and Huaxia meixue (华夏美学, Chinese Aesthetics, 1988), was the most original and most widely discussed aspect of his philosophical work. Drawing on Kant's analysis of aesthetic judgment and Marx's concept of the humanization of nature through labor, Li argued that beauty is neither a purely objective property of things nor a purely subjective response of the perceiver but the product of the historical process of "the humanization of nature" (自然的人化, ziran de renhua) — the transformation of the natural world through human practice into a world that bears the imprint of human purposes, values, and sensibilities.

In his later work, particularly Lun lishi bentilun (论历史本体论, On Historical Ontology, 2002) and Renleixue lishi bentilun (人类学历史本体论, Anthropo-Historical Ontology, 2008), Li Zehou developed an ambitious philosophical system that he called "anthropo-historical ontology" — an attempt to ground philosophy in the concrete historical development of the human species rather than in abstract metaphysical principles. This system drew on Marx's historical materialism, Kant's transcendental philosophy, and the Chinese concepts of qing (情, "emotion-feeling") and li (理, "reason-principle") to develop a comprehensive account of human existence that was simultaneously materialist and humanist, historical and normative, Chinese and universal.

Li Zehou's influence on Chinese intellectual life extended far beyond the discipline of philosophy. His cultural criticism — particularly his analysis of the "May Fourth" tradition and his concept of "salvation versus enlightenment" (救亡与启蒙, jiuwang yu qimeng) — shaped the intellectual debates of the 1980s and continues to influence Chinese cultural criticism today. His argument that the patriotic "salvation" agenda of the Chinese revolution had repeatedly overwhelmed and suppressed the "enlightenment" agenda of intellectual emancipation and individual freedom provided a powerful framework for understanding the tragic trajectory of modern Chinese intellectual history.

4. The Reception of Western Philosophy

The reform era witnessed an unprecedented opening of Chinese philosophy to Western philosophical traditions that had been excluded or marginalized during the Mao era. The "Western philosophy fever" (西方哲学热, xifang zhexue re) of the 1980s and 1990s saw the rapid translation, publication, and discussion of Western philosophical works spanning the entire history of Western thought, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary analytic and continental philosophy.

The most significant area of Western philosophical reception was the encounter with the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions — the philosophy of Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and their successors. The reception of Heidegger was particularly intense and philosophically productive. Chinese philosophers were drawn to Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics, his emphasis on the question of Being, and his engagement with non-Western — particularly East Asian — thought. Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit ("releasement" or "letting-be") was compared with the Daoist concept of wuwei (无为, "non-action"), his concept of Dasein ("being-there") was compared with the Confucian concept of ren (仁, "humaneness"), and his critique of technological modernity was compared with the traditional Chinese emphasis on harmony between human beings and nature. The Heidegger reception in China produced both genuine philosophical insights and some superficial comparative exercises, but it stimulated a new awareness of the possibilities for dialogue between Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.

The reception of Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy was equally significant, particularly for the methodology of Chinese philosophical studies. Gadamer's concept of "effective-historical consciousness" (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein), his analysis of the role of tradition in understanding, and his hermeneutic theory of the "fusion of horizons" (Horizontverschmelzung) provided Chinese scholars with conceptual tools for understanding the process of cross-cultural philosophical interpretation. The Gadamerian framework was particularly useful for addressing the question of how Chinese philosophical texts, produced in radically different historical and cultural contexts, could be meaningfully interpreted and appropriated in the contemporary world.

The reception of Habermas was important for Chinese political philosophy and social theory. Habermas's concepts of the "public sphere" (公共领域, gonggong lingyu), "communicative rationality" (交往理性, jiaowang lixing), and "discourse ethics" (话语伦理学, huayu lunlixue) provided Chinese intellectuals with a philosophical vocabulary for thinking about the conditions of democratic deliberation, the role of civil society, and the normative foundations of political legitimacy — questions that were of urgent practical relevance in a society undergoing rapid economic modernization while maintaining authoritarian political control.

The reception of Rawls's political philosophy — particularly his A Theory of Justice (1971), translated into Chinese in 1988 — was similarly significant for the development of Chinese political philosophy. Rawlsian concepts of justice, fairness, the "veil of ignorance," and the priority of liberty stimulated new debates about social justice, distributive fairness, and the philosophical foundations of political institutions in a society characterized by rapidly growing inequality.

The reception of Derrida and the broader tradition of poststructuralism and deconstruction had a more ambiguous impact on Chinese philosophy. On one hand, Derrida's critique of "logocentrism" — his argument that Western philosophy is structured by binary oppositions (presence/absence, speech/writing, nature/culture) that privilege one term over the other — resonated with Chinese philosophers who were critical of the Western tendency to subordinate Chinese thought to Western categories. On the other hand, the deconstructive emphasis on the instability and indeterminacy of meaning raised questions about the possibility of cross-cultural understanding that were troubling for a philosophical community that was deeply committed to the project of making Chinese philosophy accessible to the world.

5. "Culture Fever" and Its Aftermath

The intellectual phenomenon known as "culture fever" (文化热, wenhua re) — the intense public discussion of cultural questions that swept Chinese intellectual life in the mid-to-late 1980s — was the most significant event in the philosophical life of the reform era before the political crisis of 1989. Culture fever was not a single movement or a unified intellectual position but a broad and diverse public conversation about the fundamental questions of Chinese cultural identity: What is the relationship between Chinese culture and Western modernity? Can Chinese tradition be reconciled with modernization, or must it be rejected? What kind of culture does China need for the twenty-first century?

The culture fever of the 1980s recapitulated, in many respects, the debates of the May Fourth period sixty years earlier, but in a significantly different intellectual context. Where the May Fourth intellectuals had been divided primarily between Westernizers and cultural conservatives, the intellectuals of the 1980s had access to a much wider range of intellectual resources — not only Western liberalism and Marxism but also Western postmodernism, the New Confucian philosophy of Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the emerging discourse of "Asian values" — and they brought to the cultural debate a more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of modernization and cultural change.

The most controversial cultural event of the 1980s was the television documentary series Heshang (河殇, River Elegy, 1988), which presented a sweeping critique of traditional Chinese culture through the metaphor of the Yellow River — the "cradle of Chinese civilization" that was also the source of devastating floods and ecological destruction. Heshang argued that Chinese civilization, symbolized by the Yellow River and the Great Wall, was an inward-looking, land-based civilization that had turned its back on the ocean — the symbol of openness, commerce, and global engagement — and that China's modernization required a fundamental break with its continental, agrarian cultural heritage and an embrace of the maritime, commercial culture of the West. The series provoked intense debate and was eventually banned by the Chinese government after the political crisis of 1989.

The events of June 1989 — the suppression of the Tiananmen democracy movement — brought the culture fever of the 1980s to an abrupt end and initiated a profound transformation in the intellectual landscape of Chinese philosophy. The collapse of the democracy movement, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, discredited both liberal democratic ideology and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy in the eyes of many Chinese intellectuals, creating an intellectual vacuum that would be filled by a variety of competing philosophical positions — nationalism, neoconservatism, postmodernism, and, most significantly, a revived Confucianism.

6. Nationalism, Confucian Revival, and Political Confucianism

The most significant philosophical development of the post-1989 period has been the revival of Confucianism as a living philosophical and political tradition — a development that would have been unimaginable during the Cultural Revolution and that represents one of the most dramatic intellectual reversals in the history of Chinese thought. After decades of systematic denunciation — as "feudal ideology," as the philosophical foundation of authoritarian patriarchy, as an obstacle to modernization and progress — Confucianism reemerged in the 1990s and 2000s as a vital intellectual force that attracted the attention of scholars, policymakers, and the general public.

The Confucian revival was driven by several converging factors. The ideological vacuum left by the decline of Marxism-Leninism as a living intellectual force created a demand for alternative sources of meaning, identity, and social cohesion. The rapid economic growth and rising international status of China generated a new cultural confidence and a desire to articulate a distinctively Chinese vision of modernity that was not simply a copy of Western models. The perceived moral and spiritual costs of rapid marketization — rising inequality, corruption, environmental degradation, the erosion of social bonds — stimulated a search for ethical and philosophical resources that could address these problems, and the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on moral cultivation, social harmony, and the responsibilities of governance, appeared to offer precisely such resources.

The most radical and most controversial expression of the Confucian revival has been the movement known as "political Confucianism" (政治儒学, zhengzhi ruxue), whose leading exponent is Jiang Qing (蒋庆, born 1953). Jiang has argued that the New Confucian philosophers of the twentieth century — Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi, and their successors — made a fundamental error in focusing on the "inner" dimensions of Confucianism (心性儒学, xinxing ruxue, "mind-nature Confucianism") — moral cultivation, metaphysics, and individual spiritual development — while neglecting the "outer" dimensions — political institutions, social structures, and the organization of governance. Jiang's project is to develop a Confucian theory of political legitimacy that can serve as an alternative to both Western liberal democracy and Chinese Communist authoritarianism.

Jiang Qing's political philosophy centers on the concept of "the Way of the Humane Authority" (王道政治, wangdao zhengzhi), a theory of political legitimacy derived from the Confucian concept of the "kingly way" (王道, wangdao) as opposed to the "hegemonic way" (霸道, badao). According to Jiang, legitimate political authority must be grounded in three sources of legitimacy: sacred legitimacy (derived from Heaven and the transcendent moral order), historical and cultural legitimacy (derived from the nation's cultural tradition and historical continuity), and popular legitimacy (derived from the will of the people as expressed through representative institutions). Jiang argues that Western democracy recognizes only the third source of legitimacy — popular will — and is therefore incomplete, while Chinese Communist rule recognizes none of the three and is therefore entirely illegitimate. Only a Confucian political order, Jiang maintains, can provide the comprehensive legitimacy that is necessary for just and stable governance.

Jiang Qing's political Confucianism has been criticized from multiple directions — by liberals who regard it as a form of authoritarian traditionalism, by Marxists who see it as an ideological defense of inequality and hierarchy, and by other Confucian scholars who question both its historical accuracy and its philosophical coherence. But it has also attracted significant attention and support, both in China and internationally, and has stimulated a new wave of philosophical debate about the political implications of Confucian thought that shows no signs of abating.

7. Analytic Philosophy and the "Chinese Philosophy Legitimacy" Debate

The reception of analytic philosophy in China — the philosophical tradition associated with Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, and their successors — represents a significant and often overlooked dimension of the post-Mao philosophical revival. While the reception of continental European philosophy attracted more public attention and generated more heated cultural debate, the quiet growth of analytic philosophy in Chinese universities has produced some of the most rigorous and technically sophisticated philosophical work in contemporary China.

The development of analytic philosophy in China was facilitated by the earlier Chinese engagement with logic and the philosophy of science — a tradition that stretches back to Yan Fu's translation of Mill's System of Logic in the late Qing period and includes the logical work of Jin Yuelin (金岳霖, 1895–1984), who had studied at Columbia and Harvard and who introduced formal logic and analytic philosophy to China in the 1920s and 1930s. Jin Yuelin's philosophical system, developed in his major works Lun dao (论道, On the Way, 1940) and Zhishi lun (知识论, Theory of Knowledge, written in the 1940s but not published until 1983), represented a remarkable synthesis of analytic rigor and Chinese philosophical sensibility that anticipated many of the concerns of contemporary Chinese analytic philosophy.

The contemporary practice of analytic philosophy in China encompasses the full range of analytic specializations — logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, and meta-ethics — and is increasingly integrated into the global community of analytic philosophers through international conferences, visiting fellowships, and publication in English-language journals. Chinese analytic philosophers have made significant contributions to the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of language, and formal epistemology, and their work is increasingly recognized by the international philosophical community.

Perhaps the most intellectually significant philosophical debate of the early twenty-first century in China has been the "Chinese philosophy legitimacy" debate (中国哲学合法性问题, Zhongguo zhexue hefaxing wenti), which was triggered by a provocative essay by Zheng Jiadong (郑家栋) in 2001 and which questioned whether "Chinese philosophy" (中国哲学, Zhongguo zhexue) is a legitimate category at all. The debate raised fundamental questions: Is there such a thing as "Chinese philosophy," or is the very concept of "philosophy" (哲学, zhexue) — a term borrowed from the Japanese translation of the Western concept — so deeply rooted in the Western intellectual tradition that applying it to Chinese thought inevitably distorts and misrepresents the Chinese tradition? Should Chinese thought be studied as "philosophy" — with all the methodological and conceptual assumptions that this term carries — or should it be studied on its own terms, using indigenous categories and methods?

The debate produced a rich variety of responses. Some scholars argued that "philosophy" is a universal human activity that is practiced in all cultures, and that Chinese thought is as fully "philosophical" as Western thought — it simply addresses philosophical questions in different ways. Others argued that the concept of "philosophy" is indeed a specifically Western category and that the Chinese intellectual tradition should be studied using indigenous concepts such as dao (道, "the Way"), li (理, "principle"), and xue (学, "learning") rather than being forced into the Procrustean bed of Western philosophical categories. Still others proposed a middle position: that the encounter between Chinese thought and the concept of "philosophy" has been mutually transformative — that Chinese thought has been enriched by its engagement with Western philosophical methods and categories, while the Western concept of "philosophy" has been expanded and enriched by its encounter with the Chinese tradition.

This debate remains unresolved and continues to generate productive philosophical discussion. It reflects a broader and deeper question about the nature of philosophy itself — whether philosophy is a universal human enterprise with a single set of methods and standards, or a culturally specific intellectual practice that takes different forms in different civilizations — that is one of the most important and most challenging questions in contemporary philosophy worldwide.