Such a passage would hardly have been included in the published version had Mao been consciously attempting to masquerade as an expert on dialectical materialism through an act of plagiarism intended to deceive his readers.
Third, the point needs to be made that the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism have never, as far as I am aware, been officially published for general circulation and consumption in post-Liberation China. The versions of it which are available have been designated as neibu documents, and included in collections of material for study by academics and cadres. As study material for academics and cadres, the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism were intended for exactly the same purpose in post-Liberation China as during the Yan’an period. And it is very obvious that Chinese philosophers and Mao specialists in post-Liberation China were and are well aware of Mao’s textual debt to Soviet texts on philosophy, although this has not led them to reject the philosophy contained in the Lecture Notes.[1-127] Had Mao wished to pursue a conscious act of plagiarism in which there existed an intention to deceive, why were the Lecture Notes not substantially rewritten and re-edited, as many of his other works were prior to official republication, and published as a creature of his own intellect? The answer is, that because there existed no intention to deceive, the Lecture Notes were neither revised nor published as part of Mao’s officially sanctioned oeuvre.
On Contradiction and On Practice and the issue of plagiarism
The issue of plagiarism in the case of the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism is also important as it raises the question of the degree of influence of Soviet philosophy on Mao’s two better-known philosophical essays, On Contradiction and On Practice, and the extent of Mao’s textual reliance on these sources in their writing. After all, the three essays are, as Schram has argued, part of a “single intellectual enterprise”, written at the same time, under the same influences, and in the same historical context. If one chooses to look hard at the Soviet texts mentioned before and the works of philosophy created by Ai Siqi and Li Da during the early to mid-1930s, one is struck by the wealth of material there on the issues of dialectics, contradiction, and epistemology couched in terms remarkably similar to that employed by Mao in his own essays. However, if one pursues this line of reasoning to its apparently logical conclusion, what is the result? The result is that one ends with Wittfogel, asserting Chinese Marxism to be nothing more than an imitation and extension of Soviet and orthodox Marxism, and therefore entirely consonant with Soviet political ambitions;[1-128] or with Cohen, decrying any claim by Mao or Chinese Marxism to “originality”, perceiving there nothing but second-hand ideas dressed up as new wares.[1-129] Both of these positions, I believe, prevent a constructive and sensitive approach to an understanding of the theoretical influences which gave rise to Mao Zedong’s philosophical thought and Chinese Marxism, and to their subsequent development. For the point remains that influence and source are not the equivalent of subsequent development. Were they to be so, the realm of intellectual history would amount to nothing more than the reduction of a thinker to his or her sources and influences; the exercise would be limited to a compilation of these, and originality, innovation, and development would disappear from view. And yet there is more to the comprehension of thought, and particularly bodies of thought, than this.
My purpose is thus not to replicate the perspectives of Wittfogel and Cohen. Nevertheless, because of die exaggerated tendency within Western Mao studies to regard Mao’s Marxism as having achieved a decisive break from more orthodox forms of Marxism,[1-130] I believe it essential to return to the issue of sources and to reopen the debate on Mao’s own debt to Soviet philosophy of the 1930s; and part of this debate inevitably concerns the problem of plagiarism. Where does plagiarism start and where does it finish? Does it involve only the direct appropriation of words used in another source; does it extend (as Wittfogel implies) to summarising a passage in one’s own words; or can it be applied more generally, to indicate a reliance on or utilisation of the ideas (if not the exact words) to be found in another source? These questions are not merely rhetorical, for if we are to bring On Contradiction and On Practice under the spotlight and submit them to the same critical scrutiny as the Lecture Notes, then we may find that these two essays, without doubt the cornerstone of Chinese Marxist philosophy, bear more than just a passing similarity to the sources Mao was employing in 1936‒37. But does this imply that there is nothing original to be found in these essays? A balanced response to this question can be gained through a consideration of recent discussions of this issue by Mao specialists in China.
Since Mao’s death, scholarship on his philosophical thought in China has pursued a more independently critical path than previously. While maintaining the overwhelming significance of Mao’s writings on philosophy for the development of Chinese Marxist philosophy generally, Chinese Mao scholars have subjected his philosophical writings of 1937 to detailed and critical comparison with the texts on philosophy which constituted his major influence. This exercise has been facilitated by the publication of the annotations and marginal notes which Mao inscribed on these philosophical texts. In the context of looking closely at his sources of influence and his immediate response to them in the form of his annotations and marginalia, Chinese Mao scholars have inevitably posed the question I have raised above: to what extent were On Contradiction and On Practice reliant on Soviet texts on philosophy and those of Li Da and Ai Siqi? The response to this question is instructive.
According to Shi Zhongquan,[1-131] there is a direct relationship of text and content between On Contradiction and On Practice and two of his sources – A Course on Dialectical Materialism (Bianzhengfa weiwulun jiaocheng) and Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Bianzhengweiwulun yu lishiweiwulun). There is an indirect relationship – that of the absorption of ideas (sixiang) – between Mao’s two essays and Mitin’s Outline of New Philosophy. Shi argues that the relationship between Mao’s essays and these Soviet texts on philosophy can be looked at from two perspectives. First, it should be acknowledged that Mao’s two essays absorbed and employed the positive conclusions of the Soviet texts. Any major thinker must employ accumulated intellectual sources in the process of elaborating his theory, and Mao was no exception when he came to write On Contradiction and On Practice. Points of view and analysis from A Course on Dialectical Materialism and Dialectical and Historical Materialism were absorbed by Mao to become an organic component of his own essays on philosophy. In writing On Practice, Shi continues, Mao absorbed the viewpoint of A Course on Dialectical Materialism that, apart from practice, one could not come to know the external world, and that the process of cognition involved the stages of perception and cognition; and from Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Mao assimilated the concepts that practice could assume a multiplicity of forms, and that pre-Marxist materialism, in not stressing the social character of man, failed to comprehend the dependent relationship of knowledge to social practice. Similarly, concepts and ideas to be found in the Soviet text were to find their way into Mao’s On Contradiction. In particular, Mao drew from A Course on Dialectical Materialism the following concepts and viewpoints: the restriction which the principal contradiction imposes on other contradictions and the determining role played by the principal aspect of a contradiction, the resolution of different contradictions requires different methods, there is mutual connection and interpermeation (shentou) between a pair of opposites, difference is contradiction, the analysis of the particularity of contradiction in each process and each aspect of a process, the struggle of opposites is absolute whereas the unity of opposites is relative, and the critique of the theory of equilibrium. From Dialectical and Historical Materialism, the following views and concepts found their way into On Contradiction: the two theories of development and the critique of the theory of external causation, the analysis of the various forms of motion and the particularity of contradiction in the various stages of development, and the model examples provided by Marx and Engels of concretely analyzing concrete conditions.
1-128
Wittfogel, “Some Remarks”. See also Karl A. Wittfogel, “The Legend of ‘Maoism’”,
1-129
Cohen,
1-130
Particularly in the writing of Stuart Schram, Maurice Meisner, Benjamin Schwartz and Frederic Wakeman, Jr. For Schwartz’s contribution to Mao studies, and his views on the “disintegration” or “decomposition” of Marxism, see Benjamin I. Schwartz, “On the ‘Originality’ of Mao Tse-tung”,
1-131
Shi Zhongquan, “Yanjiu Mao Zedong zhexue sixiang de xin wenxian”, pp. 3‒9. See also Shi Zhongquan, “Mao Zedong zhexue pizhuji zhong guanyu fandui ‘zuo’ you qing cuowu de zhexue sikao” [Philosophical reflections in “Mao Zedong’s philosophical annotations” on opposing incorrect “left” and right tendencies], in