Stung by Wang Ming’s criticism of “narrow empiricism” during the early 1930s, Mao made a personal commitment to study theory and philosophy when the historical context permitted.[1-104] The opportunity to indulge in a bout of extended philosophical study presented itself during the early years of the Yan’an period and culminated in the writing of On Practice, On Contradiction, and the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism in July and August 1937. The timing of this exercise in philosophical study is significant also because it occurred just subsequent to a period in which a number of Soviet philosophical texts had been translated into Chinese.[1-105]According to Chinese scholars, three of the five or six sources so heavily employed by Mao during this period of intense study and writing were translations of Soviet texts on philosophy; the other two or three were volumes by the Chinese Marxist philosophers Ai Siqi and Li Da, whose influence we will examine in a subsequent section.[1-106]
Let us look a little more closely at these Soviet texts on philosophy. Our purpose is twofold. The first is to provide a brief description of the content of each volume. In so doing, the striking similarity of these volumes in their coverage of the philosophy of dialectical materialism will become evident. This similarity would suggest that each text was engaged in presenting a philosophy whose orthodoxy severely curtailed variation. In other words, each text was not merely metonymic, but representative of mainstream Soviet philosophy in a very real sense. Mao’s search for comprehension of this intellectual tradition, while inevitably premised on a fairly narrow textual basis, was thus made more fruitful through the repetitive nature of the texts he employed.[1-107] Moreover, the intertextual congruence of these Soviet texts also serves to query the importance of establishing the exact textual source of Mao’s plagiarism. Such an exercise has already been carried out for sections of the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism by Wittfogel and Schram.[1-108] However, if Mao’s sources are perceived as a constellation of interlocking and overlapping texts whose essential function was the same, then the issue of the direct appropriation of words, phrases, passages, even sections, assumes less significance than the general influence which these texts exercised on his thinking at that time and subsequently.
Secondly, we will briefly examine the information released recently in China about Mao’s annotations on two of these three Soviet texts.
1. A Course on Dialectical Materialism by M. Shirokov and A. Aizenberg et al., translated into Chinese by Li Da and Lei Zhongjian under the title Bianzhengfa weiwulun jiaocheng. This volume went through a series of editions, and it was the third edition published in June 1935 and the fourth edition published in December 1936 that Mao studied.[1-109] The volume contains 582 pages. The contents of A Course on Dialectical Materialism include inter alia sections on mechanistic materialism, knowledge and practice and the unity of subject and object, stages and causes of movement in the process of cognition, truth, the law of the mutual transformation of quantity into quality, the law of the unity and struggle of opposites as the essence of contemporary dialectics, the significance of the principal aspect of a contradiction, the movement of contradiction from the beginning to the end of a process, the relativity of identity and the absoluteness of struggle within the law of the unity of opposites, on equilibrium, the negation of the negation, essence and appearance, form and content, possibility and reality, chance and necessity, basis and condition, necessity and freedom, dialectical and formal logic, the fundamental laws of formal logic, and the function of experience and practice in knowledge.
