Anyone familiar with the content of Mao’s On Contradiction and On Practice will recognise at once that this list of concepts and viewpoints cuts a broad swathe through the content of those essays. Given the degree of indebtedness to Soviet philosophical sources now acknowledged by Chinese Mao scholars, to what extent can On Practice and On Contradiction be regarded as independent creations of Mao’s? In response to this, Shi insists that the acknowledgement of Mao’s debt to Soviet philosophical texts must be balanced by recognition of a number of other considerations. In the first place, the content of these Soviet texts on philosophy were themselves based on the theories and concepts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, their primary function being the elaboration and development of these theories and concepts into a philosophical system. As such, these texts on philosophy were to have a significant influence on Marxists in China and abroad and on the world of Marxist philosophy generally. It was not just Mao who was influenced by this systematization of Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
A second consideration is that the substance of On Practice and On Contradiction involves the utilisation of the viewpoint of Marxist philosophy to sum up the experiences of the Chinese revolution, and to critique subjectivism and dogmatism in its conduct; threading through the two essays is a spirit of integrating Marxist theory and the reality of the Chinese Revolution, and they are the embodiment of “practical materialism”, devoid of bookish and academic theorizing.
Consequently, Mao’s two essays can still be regarded as a major development of the philosophical theories of Marxism, Shi contends, a development manifesting its own particular characteristics. The latter judgement is supported by Shi by reference to three major differences between On Practice and On Contradiction and the Soviet texts on philosophy.
First, Mao’s two essays on philosophy were a model of the sinification and actualisation (xianshihua) of Marxism. Mao perceived Marxism as something more than an abstract body of principles, and On Contradiction and On Practice provide plentiful evidence of his attempt to integrate these principles with the concrete realities of the Chinese Revolution. Shi refers to Mao’s marginal notes in A Course on Dialectical Materialism to illustrate this point. Mao wrote, when he read the section on different contradictions requiring different methods for their resolution, “the national contradiction between China and Japan requires for its resolution a united front with the bourgeoisie”; and further on Mao wrote, “In normal times, the contradiction between labour and capital requires a united front of the workers. And in the contradiction between correct practice and incorrect tendency within the party and revolutionary ranks, the method of ideological struggle must be employed to achieve resolution”. Further examples of the kind appear to illustrate the manner in which Mao perceived the practical implications of this abstract principle.
Mao’s philosophical essays also are illustrative of the process of the sinification of Marxism insofar as they integrate Marxist philosophical concepts and ideas and those of traditional Chinese philosophy. In so doing, such traditional concepts and ideas were endowed with a scientific quality. Shi points to Mao’s employment in On Practice of the traditional philosophical category of knowledge and action (zhixingguari) and the way he linked this to knowledge (renshi) and practice. Similarly, in On Contradiction, Mao employed the traditional Chinese saying “things that oppose each other also complement each other” (xiangfan-xiangcheng) to explicate the concept of the identity of contradiction, and the law of the unity of opposites generally.
Second, not only is the philosophical framework employed by Mao in his two essays more tightly argued and complete than the Soviet sources, in terms of content many of his formulations, and much of his analysis and explanations, are clearer, more concise, systematic, and profound than the Soviet texts on philosophy. In making this claim, Shi refers to Mao’s ability in his marginal notes to summarise with great clarity and even more profoundly sections of the Soviet text. This quality was to be reflected in On Practice and On Contradiction, which were able to present concisely and with great lucidity major areas of Marxist philosophy.
Third, Shi argues that on the basis of the positive conclusions of the Soviet texts absorbed by Mao, he raised a number of new ideas (sixiang), and developed the philosophical theories of Marxism. Original ideas in On Practice include the concept of the two leaps in the process of cognition, and the notion that knowledge is a concrete historical unity of subjective and objective, theory and practice, and knowledge and action (zhi he xing); Mao also expressed the general laws of the movement of knowledge in a way not to be found in the Soviet texts. In On Contradiction, Mao provided an elaboration of the abstract category of the universality of contradiction which went beyond that to be found in the Soviet sources; Mao also systematised the elaboration to be found there on the important issue of the particularity of contradiction, and most importantly employed analysis of the complex particular contradictions of the Chinese Revolution to explicate this principle in a way which was innovative. Shi goes on to assert that the Soviet texts on philosophy did not contain mention of the concepts of the relationship of the principal and non-principal contradiction, or the transformation of the principal and non-principal aspects of a contradiction. A Course on Dialectical Materialism did, he concedes, raise the issue of the determining role of the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction, but these concepts were not elaborated. In his annotations on this Soviet text, Mao wrote the longest paragraph of any of his marginal notes on this issue (amounting to some 1200 characters), elaborating a position which was to find its way into On Contradiction; Mao’s formulation on this problem can be regarded as a development of Marxist dialectics, according to Shi. He proceeds to list a series of categories whose elaboration by Mao constituted a development of the material contained in the Soviet texts; these include generality (gongxing) and individuality, the idea that the relationship of absolute and relative are central to the question of the contradiction in things, the two important meanings of the concept of identity (tongyixing) and also the difference between concrete and imaginery identity, and the mutual relation between conditional relative identity and unconditional absolute struggle.