Abstract
As Lewis Feuer and others have pointed out, the attraction exerted by Marxism in Asia and its diffusion there “cannot be explained within the framework of the Marxist system”.3 Marx and Engels riveted their attention on Europe and gave only passing attention to Asia and other underdeveloped areas. To be sure, when they did mention Asia, they did not postulate an exact, stage-by-stage recapitulation of the pattern of historical development that they discerned in Europe. Their thinking was too sophisticated for such a crude mechanistic formula. “Only vague hypotheses”, wrote Engels, could be formulated for the sort of stages that the ‘semi-civilized’ countries would have to pass through on the way to socialism.4 But while they did not discount the possibility of different and shorter routes to the Promised Land in, for example, Russia, these conjectures were always predicated upon the prior victory of socialism in the West.
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Notes
From a speech in December 1958; in Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought (Joint Publications Research Service, Arlington, Va., 1974), Part I, p. 148.
From Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, quoted in Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York, 1959), p. 136.
See Feuer, op. cit., p. xix.
Quoted in George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, 2nd rev. edn (London, 1964), p. 362.
Ibid., p. 139.
The term ‘Leninism-Stalinism’ is Lichtheim’s. See Ibid., p. 371.
See Feuer, op. cit., pp. xix–xx; and
George Lichtheim, Imperialism (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 139.
Quoted in Ma Hong, ‘Marxism and China’s Socialist Economic Construction — Written to Commemorate the Centenary of Marx’s Death’, Social Sciences in China IV, 3 (1983), 95.
Ibid., p. 95.
Quoted in ibid., p. 96.
See Twelfth National Congress of the CPC (Beijing, 1982), p. 3.
For an excellent analysis of the pre-Marxist nationalist mood, see Michael Gasster, Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolution of 1911: The Birth of Modern Chinese Radicalism (Seattle and London, 1969).
See also Robert A. Scalapino and Harold Z. Schiffrin, ‘Early Socialist Currents in the Chinese Revolutionary Movement’, Journal of Asian Studies 18 (1959), 321–342; and
Harold Z. Schiffrin, ‘The “Great Leap” Image in Early Chinese Nationalism’, African and Asian Studies 3 (1967), 101–119.
See Xue Muqiao, China’s Socialist Economy (Beijing 1981), pp. iv–v.
See Hu Yaobang, ‘Speech at the Meeting in Celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China’ in Resolution on CPC History (1949–81) (Beijing, 1981), p. 94.
See ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China’ in Resolution on CPC History (1949–81), (Beijing, 1981), p. 56.
Ibid., p. 33.
Official assessments of Mao, including these personal failings, can be found in ibid., pp. 1–86. See also Ma Hong, op. cit., p. 99. For a more objective evaluation, see Stuart Schram’s introduction in Stuart Schram (ed.), Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed: Talks and Letters: 1956-71 (Harmondsworth, England, 1974), pp. 7–47.
See Ma Hong, op. cit., p. 99.
For a concise account of these changes, see Steven M. Goldstein, Kathrin Sears and Richard C. Bush, The People’s Republic of China, 4th edn (New York, 1984).
See Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought, Part I, p. 96.
From ‘Reading Notes on the Soviet Union’s “Political Economic”’, in ibid., p. 258.
See Xue Muqiao, op. cit., p. 313.
Quoted in Xue Muqiao, op. cit., p. 298. For a slightly different translation, see Feuer, Basic Writings…, p. 44.
See James P. Harrison, ‘The Problem of the Fifth Modernization — A Review Article’, The Journal of Asian Studies XLII (1983), 869–878.
Ibid., p. 869.
See Jonathan Mirsky’s profile of Teng, ‘A Survivor for all Seasons’ in The London Times, (April 12, 1984), p. 10.
See Hu Yaobang in The Twelfth National Congress of the CPC, p. 14.
See Nick Eberstadt, ‘Peking’s Family Policy’, The New York Times (weekly review), p. 7.
Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York, 1959)
See Feuer, Basic Writings…, p. xx.
see Harrison, op. cit., p. 376.
Chow Tse-tung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 232. For an analysis of Ch’en’s conversion to Marxism and his subsequent opposition to Mao and Stalinism,
see Benjamin Schwartz, ‘Che’en Tu-hsiu and the Acceptance of the Modern West’, Journal of the History of Ideas XII (1951), 61–72.
See Resolution on CPC History (1949–81), p. 4.
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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Schiffrin, H.Z. (1988). China Today: Retreat from Mao and Return to Marx?. In: Hook, S., O’Neill, W.L., O’Toole, R. (eds) Philosophy, History and Social Action. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 107. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2873-2_21
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