Chinese Marxist Philosophy

Chinese Marxist Philosophy is the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism that was introduced into China in the early 1900s and continues in the Chinese Academy to the current day.

Marxist philosophy was initially imported into China between 1900 and 1930, in translations from German, Russian and Japanese. This was before the formal dialectical materialism of the Communist Party, in which many independent radical intellectuals embraced Marxism. Many of them would later join the Party. Chinese Dialectical Materialism began to be formalized during the 1930s, under the influence of Mitin's New Philosophy. In the late 1930s, Chairman Mao Zedong would begin to develop his own sinified version of Dialectical Materialism that was independent of the Soviet Philosophy. Maoist Dialectics remained the dominant paradigm into the 1970s, and most debates were on technical questions of dialectical ontology. In the 1980s the Dengist reforms led to a large-scale translation and influence of works of Western Marxism and Marxist Humanism.

Li Da (1890–1966) translated many of the early works of German Social Democracy and Soviet Marxism into Chinese. He Sinified the New Philosophy of Mark Borisovich Mitin in his Elements of Sociology. Ai Siqi translated many of Mitin's works and helped introduce the New Philosophy to China. Early Chinese Marxism borrowed heavily from Soviet textbooks. Following Mitin, Ai Siqi attacked the idea of equality of contradictions between two unequal things. The Chinese Philosophers would strongly take the side of Mitin against Deborin. They were particularly influenced by his unity of theory and praxis. Mao Zedong would be influenced by these works in authoring his Lectures on Dialectical Materialism.

Mao Zedong was critical of the dialectical materialism of Stalin and notably never cited his Dialectical and Historical Materialism which was considered the foundational text of philosophical orthodoxy within the ComIntern. Mao criticized Stalin for dropping the Negation of the Negation from the laws of dialectics and for not recognizing that opposites are interconnected.

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