Knowing and Doing: Cultural and Philosophical Iconoclasm in 20th Century China

Looking back in hindsight at Mao Tse-tung’s communist rule, one cannot help but find many troubling questions longing to be answered. The causal source of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and other catastrophic projects can be traced to Mao’s ideological aspirations; however, it should be noted that the psychical, material, and social elements of Maoist thought were pollinated by an amalgam of Chinese and Western thinkers. One may ask as to how the creative machinations and ideas of foreign thinkers impressed themselves upon Mao’s mind. One may also ask what inspired Mao, and elements within the Chinese population, to willingly tear asunder the philosophical, political, and sociological thought of the Orient and “replace” the empty void with the alien and seemingly incompatible ideas of the Occident. In order to answer these question, I will be investigating the state of Chinese philosophical thought following the dissolution of Imperial China; the call for a “new culture” and a “new China” by Western-educated Chinese intellectuals; the influence of the New Culture Movement on Mao; and the substance of Mao’s philosophic thought in relation to that of traditional Chinese philosophers. Ultimately, Mao’s Sinification of Marxist-Leninist theory and his adoption of certain Western ideals resulted in an ideology that was palatable to the Chinese masses, and found its historical justification through the perversion and manipulation of texts, thinkers, and mediums that had served as the soil into which China’s traditional cultural, social, philosophical roots had grown for millennia.

During China’s imperial age, the Chinese generally thought of themselves as exemplifying the qualities of a “superior” people, most notably in terms of culture, philosophy, and government.1 The Chinese had long valued “things of the mind,” and believed that the appropriate mode of life was to master the art of living in harmony and happiness.2 Wealth, in-itself, was nothing more than barren metal; only when material objects acquire utility and serve as a tool for bringing one closer to happiness did these goods attain actual value. State of mind was indeed the kernel of the traditional Chinese view of meaning and purpose. Toiling for the sake of an accumulation of wealth was thought to result in a divorcing of harmony between the subject of volition and the object of production and consumption. Material matters were dismissed as being trivial in the measurement of high culture, as perceived by the traditionally minded.3 However, these material matters eventually disrupted the flow of Chinese thought and impressed themselves upon the shaken Chinese spirit, culminating in a Western domination of China. The materially minded “barbarians” were now penetrating Chinese lands and establishing their own beacons of influence.

As Western philosophy, scientific advancements, political ideologies, and social theories poured into China, the seeds of change in the Chinese culture were gradually sewed. The Chinese intelligentsia became entranced by an unceasing influx of Western ideas and sought to adopt and practically apply them to China herself. There were many Chinese intellectuals who were deeply inspired by the Western accomplishments, values, civil societies, and democratic social structures. These same intellectuals set in motion a plan for a “new and improved” China. They sought to formalize and organize their political, social, and cultural aspirations through calls to action. This “New Culture Movement” sprouted and flourish in the 1910’s and 1920s and aimed for the complete transformation of China out of its old days of weakness and backwardness into a forward thinking and advanced power on par with technologically advanced and democratic Western nations. Initially coming from a purely iconoclastic direction, their core focus was the “total annihilation of the values, traditions, and customs of the past and their replacement by a wholly new culture based on the Western democratic and scientific values [the intellectuals] so admired.”4 However, the Chinese Intelligentsia’s appreciation of Western liberalism and culture came to a crashing halt with the closing of World War I. The end of the war meant reparations and compensation for the victors; however, the actions laid out in the peace treaty ignored the voices and sovereignty of the Chinese, who in fact had fought on the side of the victors. The actions taken by the Western powers after the War ignited the “May 4th Movement” in China, when “more than 3,000 university students in Beijing demonstrated against the decision of the Western democracies at the Versailles peace conference to transfer the former German imperialist concessions in Shandong Province to Japan as war booty.”5 It was this feeling of betrayal and change of heart which redirected the attention of Chinese intellectuals away from Western liberalism that they had once idolized; however, they remained captivated by a particular strains of Western thought, most notably Marxism and communism. According to Theodore de Bary, Wing-Tsit Chan, and Burton Watson in Sources of Chinese Tradition:

“After the Student Movement of May 4, 1919, two currents of thought, ultra-individualistic liberalism and class-struggle communism, found their way into Chinese academic circles, and later became widespread in the country. On the whole, Chinese academic circles desired to effect a change in our culture, forgetting that it had certain elements which are immutable. With respect to Western theories they imitated only their superficial aspects and never sought to understand their true significance in order to improve China’s national life. The result was that a large number of our scholars and students adopted the superficialities and nonessentials of Western culture and lost their respect for and confidence in our own culture.”6

Intellectuals saw communism as an inviting means by which China could banish its alleged backwardness and inferiority (as they perceived it in relation to the hegemonic powers of the Western world that were sinking their teeth into the once “superior” orient and draining the land of its energy and pride. Chinese intellectuals “emerged out of a long process of nationalist alienation from traditional Chinese values, so now the New Marxist intelligentsia grew out of nationalist disillusionment with the Western bourgeois democratic ideologies.”7 Those same Western powers to which the Chinese intelligentsia looked upon with awe were now vilified as backstabbers and their “bourgeois democratic ideologies” were merely façades behind which Western imperialism could cloak its true intentions. Turing away from the allegedly “bourgeois” thought propagated by Western powers, emboldened Chinese intellectuals and their distraught students turned their attention to Marxism, which “provided the Chinese intelligentsia with a path that rejected “both the traditions of the Chinese past and Western domination of the Chinese present.”8

The adoption of Marxism by the Chinese intelligentsia may be interpreted as a shocking act of cultural and spiritual self-mutilation; indeed these very intellectuals had now ignited a spark which would eventually evolve into a towering conflagration that would bring down the very traditions upon which China had stood for millennia and drastically alter the future course of Chinese history. These intellectuals were no longer authentic representatives of the Chinese spirit, on the contrary, they were cosmopolitans through and through (many of whom were educated at Western universities), tearing themselves from their Chinese roots. Their radical aims were inspired by the unfolding of international events, such as that of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The Chinese intellectuals’ enthusiasm for the Bolshevik victory is illustrated in a piece by Li Ta-Chao, a professor and librarian at Peking University, whose radical thought greatly molded the mind of one of his students and assistants at the library, Mao Tse-tung. When speaking of the Bolshevik movement, Li Ta-Chao proudly exclaims that “all those dregs of history which can impede the progress of [Bolshevism]—such as emperors, nobles, warlords, bureaucrats, militarism, capitalism—will certainly be destroyed as though struck by a thunderbolt…The bell is rung for humanitarianism! The dawn of freedom has arrived!”9 The Chinese intellectuals who sought to craft an image of “progress” in China, paralleling that of the Bolsheviks in Russia, and strike fear into the hearts of the “bourgeois” Western imperial powers, as did the Bolsheviks in Russia. These Chinese intellectuals maintained a perspective that divorced them from the destructive forces silently hibernating within their own “revolutionary” ideas. They embraced the alien doctrine of communism as an answer that would deliver China from the humiliating characterizations imprinted upon her, such as being “incapable, disorganized, and backward.”10 Communism holds that “all social changes and political revolutions are to be explained primarily in economic terms.”11 Further, communism, and the philosophy of Marx and Lenin overall, are “end products of a line of thinking that can be traced far back in Western philosophy.”12 And perhaps most importantly, communism has a “tendency to control people by organizing them into large groups, emphas[izes] material things, and [gives] importance to economics, [makes it] far more similar to the philosophy of the West in general than to the traditional thought it has displaced in China.”13

 

For China, communism was an answer to their present dilemma and a method of national vindication after years of imperialist humiliation. Eventually, the Chinese nation state, under communist control, would be able to craft a narrative that would “point with pride to the glories of Chinese history and claim the great Chinese thinkers of the past as belonging to the intellectual heritage of the Chinese communist party.”14 Despite its having been woven into an ideological fabric by Western minds, the adoption of communism by the Chinese did not result in a sympathetic attitude towards the West, quite the contrary, it was a means by which the Chinese could challenge the West on an international stage and prove itself as a force to be reckoned with. Interestingly, this appropriation of Marxism and communism in “New China” resembles, mutatis mutandis, Imperial China’s call for “learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to control the barbarians” in the 1850s.15  

In order to understand the seismic shift which shook the Chinese civilization to its core, we must first trace its roots in the “classics” of Chinese philosophical thought and its relation to the “new thought.” When examining the communist dissection of traditional Chinese philosophy, it becomes clear that there was no stone left untouched. Even prior to the communist takeover, the teachings of Confucius were beginning to be ravaged by these “new” intellectuals, most notably by Ch’en Tu-Hsiu, who was the editor of New Youth, a radical Chinese magazine. According to Ch’en, “Confucianism stood simply for reaction and obscurantism…[and] with everything from the past that, to his mind, had smothered the progress and creativity.”16 In fact, such flaming critiques began to echo throughout young student masses who had no meaningful attachment to Confucian thought and culminated in chants and demonstrations wherein students gladly shouted iconoclastic slogans, including “Destroy the old curiosity shop of Confucius!” and “Overthrow Confucius and his progeny!”17

 

In 1935, Sa Meng-Wu, Ho Ping-Sung, and eight other intellectuals, published a “Declaration for Cultural Construction on a Chinese Basis,” which, as its title suggests, unveiled a plan for the construction of a new Chinese culture. In the text, two important calls to action stand out among the others: (i) “We must examine our heritage, weed out what should be weeded out, and preserve what should be preserved…evil systems and inferior thoughts which are worthy of condemnation should be totally eliminated without the slightest regret.”18 And (ii) “It is right and necessary to absorb Western culture. But we should absorb what is worth absorbing and not…absorb its dregs also.”19 These positions exemplify the intellectuals’ adherence to a supposedly critical “scientific” method for creating a “new” culture in China.20 Ironically, this tone was not radical enough for the likes of Hu Shih, an influential figure in the “New Culture Movement,” who responded to the ten writers, arguing that they were in fact harboring “reactionary” and “conservative” attitudes by attempting to peddle a “compromise” between the old and the new. In an iconoclastic manner, Hu states that “it is the people—all the people” that is the basis of Chinese culture and one need not fear the complete destruction of the old culture. Hu assures the his fellow intellectuals that “no matter how radically the material existence has changed, how much intellectual systems have altered, and how much political systems have been transformed…the Chinese are still the Chinese” and because of this, the “new culture” will still have a Chinese basis.21 In retrospect, both the plan and its criticism by Hu can be interpreted as an ominous foreshadowing of what was to unfold three decades later during the Cultural Revolution.

When looking at the forces that sprang the Chinese communist insurgency, we see that it was intellectuals, not the peasant and worker masses, who fostered, pampered, and unleashed the ravenous, blood-red beast of communism to feast on the Chinese spirit. Communism, as formulated by Marx and Engels, was a Western ideology, and was complete with its own dogmatic axioms. Communism provided its adherents with “economic” colored and “materially” tainted spectacles—crafted by man-himself, not by nature—for surveying the world in all its spiritual richness; and was designed to filter out the aura of spirit and permit only a materialist skeleton, a mechanical husk to shine upon the veiled eye of the beholder. 

The state of Chinese philosophy in post-1949 China continued to evolve and was becoming nearly synonymous with Mao’s own philosophical outlook.22 Mao’s own thought was considerably shaped by the likes of Chinese intellectual figures who had come to represent the calls for radical political, cultural, economic, and social change, such as Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and Hu Shi.23 Some of Mao’s most notable philosophical works include On Practice and On New Democracy, which where published in 1937 and 1940, respectively. In these works, Mao’s relationship to traditional Chinese philosophy becomes clear; “in the former, the nature of philosophy for New China is defined, and in the latter the future of Chinese traditional philosophy is virtually decided.”24 Mao’s philosophical attitude is rooted in the theory that knowledge and action are fundamentally unified. Interestingly, this unity of theory and practice had percolated through the veins of traditional Chinese thought for centuries, and Mao’s upholding of this maxim demonstrates that the underlining axiom upon which his “revolutionary” philosophy stood was not entirely alien to that which had circulated through the minds of traditional Chinese philosophers. In On Practice, Mao illustrates his guiding principle by appealing to an epistemological framework (the italics are my own):

“Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.”25 

When examining the substance and footnotes of On Practice, one soon discovers that Mao spills little ink on the significance of “knowing and doing” in the works of traditional Chinese thinkers like Confucius.26 On the contrary, traditional Chinese thought is entirely overlooked in the treatise and is instead made up for by Mao’s frequent appeals to non-Chinese intellectuals such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.27 

There are, however, several instances in the text wherein Mao haphazardly includes several “old Chinese sayings” and a couple of allusions to historical examples of what he understands to be the Chinese people’s “perceptual knowledge” of imperialism transforming into “rational knowledge” of imperialism—an epistemological model which he considers to be evidence that legitimizes his dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge and reality.28 For the first stage, Mao cites the “anti-foreign struggles” of the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxer Uprising; for the second stage, Mao claims that the May 4th Movement of 1919 was the period wherein the Chinese masses discovered the “internal and external contradictions of imperialism and saw the essential truth that imperialism had allied itself with China’s comprador and feudal classes to oppress and exploit the great masses of the Chinese people.”29 In the former stage, Mao’s superficial analysis of these historical events fails to account for innumerable complexities and nuances in the social, spiritual, and cultural milieu at the time of their unfolding. In the latter stage, Mao’s analysis may be more consistent with what manifested in actuality; however, this by no means absolves Mao of his post hoc ergo proper hoc conclusions. In short, Mao contorts and truncates these seismic events in Chinese history into a grand narrative that conforms to his dialectical-materialist view of reality; he then appeals to the events (after being conditioned by a dialectical-materialist framework) as being vindications of his brand of dialectical-materialism, thus begging the question.

One of the most fascinating element of Mao’s thought was his “extraordinary emphasis on the role of human consciousness in the making of history.”30 Furthermore, although Mao’s brand of dialectical-materialism “paid ideological deference to the presumably “objective laws” of historical development set forth in orthodox Marxist texts, [Mao] clearly believed that the course of history ultimately was determined by what people thought...”31 Related to the central role of consciousness in historical development are traces of idealism that manifest themselves in several of Mao’s speeches; namely his assertions that mental force or consciousness alone has the capacity to alter or change the development and outcome physical affairs. This dynamism of mind to matter and matter to mind seems to depart from any kind of coherent materialist or idealist monism. In fact, a kind of dualism emerges. Mao’s thought reflects elements found in that of Lenin, who in turn furthered the brand of materialism advocated within Marx’ own oeuvre—which happened to be a materialist inversion of the absolute idealism of Hegel. The arduous struggles endured on the “Long March” provided Mao with evidence for his theory of “consciousness” and its power to navigate and transform a world of physical objects. Mao explicitly addresses this in his May 1963 speech, Where do Correct Ideas Come From?, wherein he makes the following remarks (the italics are placed by me for emphasis):

“Furthermore, the one and only purpose of the proletariat in knowing the world is to change it. Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter…[M]atter can be transformed into consciousness and consciousness into matter…such leaps are phenomena of everyday life.”32

However, in this speech, Mao’s assertion of the causal efficacy of consciousness contradicts his earlier stance that, “consciousness as well as all its products—thoughts, ideas, impressions, theories…are restricted, bounded and enclosed by matter.”33 Returning back to the sources for Mao’s own brand of materialism, we see that Lenin says “the fundamental premise of materialism is the recognition of the external world, of the existence of things outside and independent of our mind…the object exists independently of the subject…”34 Based on the statements of Lenin and that of Mao, we are left wondering how Mao’s ardent dialectical-materialist epistemological views can be reconciled with the fragments of idealism expressed within Mao’s revolutionary thought as articulated after the struggles he and his revolutionaries endured on “The Long March,” such as the transformative power of consciousness. As a matter of fact, the very plausibility of dialectical-materialism appears to rest upon the idealism which it rejects:

“Dialectical materialism claims to have freed Hegel’s dialectic from the errors due to his idealism. But these doctrines, the sovereignty of thought, the dialectic as a superior mode of understanding, the identity of being and knowing, the emergence of truth from error, and knowledge and practice as a single process approaching truth asymptotically, are all plausible only in a context of idealistic monism. In a materialistic system there is no more reason why the human intellect should be sovereign than the dog’s or the ant’s intellect: dogs and ants are part of nature, too. The dialectic is an infallible guide only if it embodies the self-movement of the idea: otherwise it is just as likely to lead to error as to truth. In materialism there can be no inevitability about the emergence of truth from the errors of men whose “thought is extremely unsovereign”. In the same way, there is no foreordained progress towards truth through eating, digging, and building….[Marx’s] very argument, that in materialism physiological processes determine thought, has been used by McTaggart to disprove materialism. These processes proceed according to the laws of physiology, not of logic, and accordingly are not likely to give truth. If, then, our ideas are physiological processes, those ideas will be unreliable, and in particular the doctrine of materialism will be unreliable. Hence, materialism is self-contradictory.”35

Mao’s re-direction of philosophical inquiry away from “abstract concepts, idealistic theories, and subjectivism” towards “the discovery and solution of practical problems,” exemplifies his deeply held conviction that practice is the only meaningful way of acquiring and employing knowledge in the world.36 Metaphysical speculations and methodologies were cast into the pit of counterrevolutionary ideas.37 The unitary nature of knowledge and activity was to be reaffirmed through the working in tandem of philosophy and production and implementation of the two in “the transformation of existing philosophy according to the Marxist pattern.38 In his 1961 article, “Chinese Philosophy in Communist China,” the late Wing-tsit Chan, a professor of Chinese philosophy at Dartmouth College, addressed the future of Chinese philosophy under the Maoist regime (the italics are my own):

“What is the future of Chinese philosophy? In point of fact, research on Chinese philosophy is going on. Studies and commentaries on Chinese philosophical classics are being published. It can be said, however, that its fate is the same as that of philosophy in general, namely, that it must be reconstructed according to the Marxist pattern.”39

Wing-Tsit’s “revolutionary” sympathies seep into his writing and present the iconoclasm at work under a positive light. In fact, he sees Chinese philosophy as simply undergoing a self-reflective development away from “its idealism and abstract ideas” and directing its attention back to worldly, practical matters for the benefit of the Chinese masses.40 Interestingly, Wing-Tsit reluctantly labels Confucius, Chu Hsi, Wang Yang-ming, and other Chinese philosophers as “feudalists,” albeit, “they were primarily interested in the solution of practical problems for all.”41 On a broader cultural and philosophical scale, Chinese philosopher Hsiao Sha-Fu articulated the necessity for a synthesis or Sinification of Western Marxist thought into a compatible philosophic structure. Fung writes:

“The profound studies and classical criticism of European philosophy by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin are forever models in our study. Especially are the philosophical writings of comrade Mao Tse-t’ung and his comrades-in-arms most glorious examples showing us how to continue our philosophical heritage and to unify Marxian philosophy and the Chinese people’s good traditions of thought.”42  

In his later work, On New Democracy, Mao draws a plan for the restructuring of culture and philosophy in “New China.” Mao rhetorically asks, “we want to build a new national culture, but what kind of culture should it be?”43 He answers his own question through a Marxist lens, and describes a culture as:

“a reflection of the politics and economics of a given society, and the former in turn has a tremendous influence and effect upon the latter; economics is the base and politics the concentrated expression of economics…It follows that the form of culture is first determined by the political and economic form, and only then does it operate on and influence the given political and economic form.”44 

According to both Hsiao and Ai Siqi, another Chinese Marxist philosopher, Mao’s vision of a fusion between Western Marxist theory and Eastern practice would be successful via a critical analysis of China’s cultural heritage using Marxist-Leninist methodological tools. Ai argues that, it is necessary to “select its quintessence and to through away its dregs.”45 He proceeds to define his terms and renders his conclusion absolute (the italics are my own):

“What is its quintessence? It is that part of the heritage that is democratic, scientific, and for the masses. What are the dregs? They are what is anti-democratic, anti-scientific, and anti-people, or aristocratic. The culture we want to build up is that which is nationalistic, democratic, scientific, and for the masses. Therefore, what we want to continue is that in the old culture which is democratic, scientific, and for the masses, and we must throw away what is anti-democratic, anti-scientific, and anti-people. This should be the general attitude of Marxists-Leninists toward cultural heritage. This is a universal principle.”46 

In his discussion of the nature of culture, Mao puts forward a vague plan with to replace China’s old economy and old culture and fill the void with “the new politics, the new economy and the new culture of the Chinese nation.”47 However, Mao’s words possess some degree of caution, and attempts to clarify what he means when he says that the old culture must be expunged and this is present in Mao’s plan of action for the development of a “new culture.” Regarding the future of the “ancient culture,” Mao states that: 

“To throw away its feudal dross, and to absorb its democratic essence [are] necessary condition[s] for the development of our new national culture and for the increase of our national self-confidence; but we should never absorb anything and everything un- critically. We must separate all the rotten things of the ancient feudal ruling class from the fine ancient popular culture that is more or less democratic and revolutionary in character…we must respect our own history and should not cut ourselves adrift from it. However, this respect for history means only giving history a definite place among the sciences, respecting its dialectical development, but not eulogizing the ancient while disparaging the modern, or praising any noxious feudal element.”48 

Mao’s relationship to Confucius is nebulous and is by no means black and white, for it is riddled with contradictions and exhibits varying degrees ranging from sympathy to disdain. Professor Robert Payne, a British writer who had interviewed Mao in 1946, remarked that Mao’s own thinking had been profoundly influenced by Confucius, but that Mao had also said, “I hated Confucius from the age of eight.”49 Such brash contempt is not an isolated incident, it is also evidenced in Mao’s own writings; for example, “emphasis on the honoring of Confucius and the reading of the classics, and advocacy of the old rules of propriety (li) and education and philosophy” are part of China’s semi-feudal culture which must be overthrown.”50 

  

Paradoxically, in 1957, Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist Humanism in the United States, criticized Mao’s relationship to Confucianism in her book, Marxism and Freedom, calling it a “perversion.” She writes, “So permeated to the marrow of his bones is Mao with Confucianism that it is doubtful he is even conscious that he is thereby perverting in toto the Hegelian-Marxian theory of development through contradiction.”51 So much for Mao’s “hatred” of Confucius.

To return to Mao’s cultural sentiments, we see a hostility to traditional Chinese thought, culture, and customs in a message delivered to French Foreign minister Andre Malraux. In that message, Mao states that “the thought, culture, and customs which brought china to where we found her [in 1949] must disappear, and the thought, customs, and culture of proletarian China, which do not yet exist, must appear.”52 Such a statement would mean that the Confucianism “so permeated to the marrow of [Mao’s] bones” would have to be shattered as well, because according to Mao’s own words, Confucius belongs to China’s “semi-feudal culture” and had to be “overthrown.”53 Perhaps the “democratic” and “revolutionary” elements hidden within Confucius’ teachings could be salvaged. Furthermore, we can see that Mao was not one to shy away from “absolute” truths. In his many writings, Mao explicitly states that dialectical-materialism is “universally true because it is impossible for anyone to escape from its domain in his practice.”54 Mao also declares Marxism to be a “universal truth” several times in On New Democracy.55 Such dogmatic utterances would have been scolded by Confucius, for he “was one of the most uncompromising opponents of dogmatism” and “made no claim to the possession of the ultimate truth.”56,57

Despite all the calls for cultural iconoclasm, there was a push by the communist elites to retain some semblance of Chinese identity in the communism they were offering to the masses, in fact it may be said that “the Chinese Communists [were] much too intelligent to attempt to abandon China’s cultural tradition” and alienate the populace.58 Indispensable mediums, such as theater, plays, and literature were now vessels of public “re-education.” All aspects of social life were being crammed into a Marxist construct that served Mao’s aims for revolution. Accordingly, these fountains of culture were now the scenes of revolutionary activity; playwrights “were “not only writing new plays but also revising and “reforming” some of the old favorites to make them serve this purpose...It has been reported that some of the ancient literature is being re-edited. Even the results of archeological excavations are being reinterpreted in [Marxist] terms…”59

 

Following this same theme of using the past to shape the present, Liu Shao-ch’i, who held the title of Vice-Chairman of the Communist Party of China and was once the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, wrote a famous work titled How To Be a Good Communist, which outlined many of the key ideas that grounded Chinese communist thought. Liu’s writing includes fragmented quotes from “Confucius, Mencius, and other Chinese philosophers of the past. He does not condemn them but, instead borrows their authority to bolster Communist arguments.”60 Furthermore, Liu’s peppering of traditional Chinese philosophy into his own work reflects the necessity to maintain some form of stable ground in order to establish some form of continuity in Chinese thinking. This is also present in Mao’s own words, when he dismissed the notion that an alien culture would come to occupy the place of the old:

“China has suffered a great deal from the mechanical absorption of foreign material. Similarly, in applying Marxism to China, Chinese communists must fully and properly integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, or in other words, the universal truth of Marxism must be combined with specific national characteristics and acquire a definite national form if it is to be useful, and in no circumstances can it be applied subjectively as a mere formula…Chinese culture should have its own form, its own national form. National in form and new-democratic in content—such is our new culture today..”61 

This “synthesis” was not limited to foreign ideas, but also included the incorporation of materials that could be “salvaged” from traditional Chinese customs and culture.

“To make clear the process by which this traditional culture developed, to discard its feudal residue, and to absorb its democratic essence, are necessary steps for developing our new national culture and heightening our national self-confidence. This assimilation, however, must never be uncritical. We must carefully discriminate between those completely rotten aspects of the old culture that were linked with the feudal ruling class, and the excellent popular culture, which was more or less democratic and revolutionary in character.”62 

Such a discrimination was by no means a simple task, especially if China was to maintain some semblance of its heritage.

In 1953, Dr. H.G. Creel, a professor of Chinese philosophy at the University of Chicago began investigating the effects that the communist takeover had on the thinking of the Chinese at-large. After four years of communist rule, Creel noted that “some significant facts are quite clear” regarding the contemporaneous state of the Chinese mind, for example, “if one examines such pronouncements of Mao Tse-tung…there is little to indicate that they were written by a Chinese. The framework of thought is Marxist; the very rare illustrations relation to the Chinese culture seem almost self-consciously added, to keep the writings from seeming to foreign.”63 Creel speaks of the instruments being utilized by the communist authorities, such as the phenomena of “re-education,” and revolutionary “study groups” wherein “many persons spend hours every day, and many millions spend some time daily, studying the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung.”64 What is most profound, according to Creel, is the radical transformation of children’s attitudes towards their parents. Filial piety had been a central tenant of Chinese thinking; “in traditional China, it was unthinkable that a child should give evidence against his or her parents; to do so was in fact a legal offense.”65 However, with the creation of public “mass trials” and other weapons used for communist propaganda, children were encouraged to tear apart the millennia old tradition of filial piety by denouncing their accused parents in order to demonstrate their loyalty to communism.66 These transitions illustrate a profound altering, nay seismic undoing, of Chinese customs that had been around for millennia, and can be thought of as an outcome of the pernicious nature of Mao’s thought and the influx of Marxism and communism into the Orient.

Despite having died over 43 years ago, Mao’s ghostly shadow continues to loom over China and all her manifestations, whether it be her people, her culture, her economy, her government, and her social sphere. His syncretism of Marxism, communism, radicalism, iconoclasm, and philosophical eclecticism cast an unmistakable aura that continues to pierce through the heart of the Chinese spirit to this day. However, by contrast, Mao’s own worldview, and his many machinations and utopian designs, lied nascent within the hearts and minds of the radical Chinese intelligentsia that had preceded him. Their collective desire to realize those fantasies was finally actualized by Mao, resulting in a tragic cultural and spiritual calamity that shook the entire Chinese nation and destroyed thousands of years of rich traditions, customs, relics, and ideas belonging to a magnificent people.

Footnotes

[1] Herrlee Glessner Creel, Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-Tung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 1. 

[2] Creel, Chinese Thought, 7.

[3] Ibid, 5.

[4] Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the Peoples Republic (New York: Free Press, 1999).

[5] Meisner, Mao’s China, 17.

[6] Theodore de Bary, Wing-Tsit Chan, and Burton Watson. Sources of Chinese Tradition. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 809.

[7] Meisner, Mao’s China, 18.

[8] Ibid, 18.

[9] Bary, Wing-Tsit, and Watson. Sources of Chinese Tradition, 865.

[10] Creel, Chinese Thought, 4.

[11] Ibid, 3.

[12] Ibid, 3.

[13] Ibid, 2.

[14] Ibid, 4.

[15] Erik Baark, Technological Development in China, India and Japan Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 40.

[16] Bary, Wing-Tsit, and Watson. Sources of Chinese Tradition, 703.

[17] Yang Fenggang, “Responsibilities and Rights: Tradition in Chinese Society,” in Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, ed. George G. McLean, vol. 6 (The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992), pg. 209-223, 219.

[18] Bary, Wing-Tsit, and Watson. Sources of Chinese Tradition, 855.

[19] Ibid, 855.

[20] Ibid, 856.

[21] Ibid, 857.

[22] Wing-Tsit Chan. “Chinese Philosophy in Communist China.” Philosophy East and West 11, no. 3 (1961), 115.

[23] Robert A. Scalapino, “The Evolution of a Young Revolutionary—Mao Zedong in 1919–1921,” The Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 1 (1982): pp. 29-61, p.58.

[24] Wing-Tsit Chan. “Chinese Philosophy in Communist China.” (1961), 115.

[25] Mao Tse-tung, “On Practice,” Marxist Internet Archive, (July 1937).

[26] Mao, “On Practice.”

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Meisner, Mao’s China, 295.

[31] Ibid, 295.

[32] Mao Tse-tung. “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” Marxist Internet Archive, n.d.

[33] Vsevolod Holubnychy. “Mao Tse-tung’s Materialistic Dialectics.” The China Quarterly, no. 19 (1964). 23.

[34] V.I. Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,” Marxist Internet Archive, n.d.

[35] Philip Spratt, “Dialectical Materialism as Philosophy of Nature.” (1958), 17-18.

[36] Wing-Tsit Chan. “Chinese Philosophy in Communist China.” (1961), 116.

[37] Ibid, 118.

[38] Ibid, 116.

[39] Ibid, 117.

[40] Ibid, 118.

[41] Ibid, 118.

[42] Ibid, 122.

[43] Mao Tse-tung, “On New Democracy,” Marxist Internet Archive (Marxist Internet Archive, n.d.).

[44] Ibid. 

[45] Wing-Tsit Chan. “Chinese Philosophy in Communist China.” (1961), 122.

[46] Ibid, 122.

[47] Mao, “On New Democracy.”

[48] Wing-Tsit Chan. “Chinese Philosophy in Communist China.” (1961), 116.

[49] Creel, Chinese Thought, 254.

[50] Ibid, 254.

[51] Raya Dunayevskaya, “Mao Perverts Lenin,” Marxist Internet Archive, (1957).

[52] Meisner, Mao’s China, 299.

[53] Creel, Chinese Thought, 254.

[54] Mao, “On Practice.”

[55] Mao, “On New Democracy.”

[56] Creel, Chinese Thought, 254.

[57] Ibid, 38.

[58] Ibid, 256.

[59] Ibid, 256.

[60] Ibid, 256.

[61] Mao, “On New Democracy.”

[62] Creel, Chinese Thought, 255.

[63] Ibid, 253.

[64] Ibid, 253.

[65] Ibid, 253.

[66] Ibid, 3.