The history of Chinese Marxist thought is intimately intertwined with ancient autochthonous philosophical texts. In Chinese Dialectics the complete intellectual history of Chinese Marxism is laid bare.

Western scholars read "dialectical materialism" in Chinese Marxism within a Western philosophical frame. Some hold that Chinese Marxism is Chinese in some important sense, but fail to see what is involved; others see nothing particularly Chinese about Chinese Marxism. Similarly, Chinese Marxists identify bianzhengfa with Marxian dialectic, without adequately realizing the difficulties attending that concept. ;The dissertation shows tongbian as a distinct but not necessarily unique style of Chinese "thought" , which was formulated in ancient philosophical literature such as the (...) Yijing. I argue that Chinese intellectuals understand Marxist thought in terms of tongbian. What tong-bian sees is a "world as such," or ziran ; with no transcendence, every element is relative to every other and all elements are thus "correlative." Each particular is both self-determinate and determined by every other. An explanation of relationships requires a contexualist interpretation of the world in which events are strictly interdependent. "Polarity" implies a relationship of two events, each constituting a necessary condition for the other. Yin always suggests becoming-yang, and vice versa. Any two events constantly alternate each another, change into each other, exchange with each other, displace each other, and so on. The salient feature of tongbian philosophy is that the complementary and contradictory interactions of the two basic elements of a polarity like yin-yang constitute the forces, and produce change. ;Chinese Marxism finds its roots in Engels but reads him in a distinctly different way and, by drawing on tongbian, develops into a strong and useful strand of thought. I examine this in the writings of Cai Yuanpei, Qu Qiubai, Ai Siqi, and Mao Zedong. I show that juxtaposing dialectics with bianzhenga is a misunderstanding. The version of Chinese Marxism that I recover seems close to Marx on certain points, especially In terms of "internal relations." However, it is rather a third way as developed from a culture and tradition that can not be understood in Western terms. (shrink)

Western materialism and dialectics are different from their Chinese analogues. The informed perspective presented here may rouse a sensitivity to these differences in a tongbian reading of Marxist philosophy on the part of Chinese intellectuals; Marxism is no longer exactly what it is understood to be in the Western tradition. Ai Siqi's discussions of "materialism" and "the interpenetration of opposites" exemplify how Chinese Marxism draws on tongbian to read Marx and Engels in a distinctly different way. Little in Ai's thought (...) can be identifiable with Engels' law of unity of contradiction, where all motion consists of the interplay of attraction and repulsion, and the form of motion is what physics terms "energy." Following Hall and Ames on correlative thinking in the Chinese tradition, it is argued that certain Western cosmological assumptions have led to differences between Western Marxism and particular philosophical currents in the Chinese tradition, and that Chinese Marxism has developed from a culture and tradition that cannot be understood fully in terms of Western categories. (shrink)