DEVELOPMENT OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN CHINA

Marxism is definitely the most significant element in Western thought that has provided an opportunity for a philosophical conversation with Chinese tradition in modern times. And, in the process of this conversation, a Chinese version of Marxism started to develop and finally came to fruition in the thought of Mao Zedong (毛澤東). What is particularly worth noting, firstly, is that this conversation was not a government or official campaign, but the efforts made on the part of countless individual intellectuals who conceived a deep concern for the future of turbulent China after the downfall of Qing Manchurian rule. Secondly, the philosophical conversation had a striking feature of ‘dialectics’, or bian-zheng-fa (辯證法), which not only pervades philosophical levels of discourse in China, but also the thinking and speech of ordinary persons in their everyday lives, particularly for the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s, and until the ending of the 1970s when Deng Xiaoping (鄧小 平) came to power and openly declared the start of his capitalist ‘Economic Reform’ with the name of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’.