In their identification of Mao’s plagiarism, both Wittfogel and Schram[1-117] have compared sections of Ai Siqi’s translations of Mitin’s 1933 work Dialectical Materialism which appear in a volume entitled Zhexue xuanji published in Shanghai in 1939 with Mao’s Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism. While there can be no doubt that Schram and Wittfogel are correct in identifying Mitin as the author of these passages, it is highly probable that the exact textual source was the volume Dialectical and Historical Materialism under consideration here, and published in December 1936. Some textual comparisons are provided in the notes and in the tables appended to this Introduction.[1-118]
3. Outline of New Philosophy, edited by M.B. Mitin et al., translated by Ai Siqi and Zheng Yili, and published in Chinese as Yin zhexue dagang in June 1936.[1-119] This volume, of 454 pages, contains sections on the historical origins of dialectical materialism, the two tendencies in philosophy, the object of dialectical materialism, matter and motion, space and time, the law of the unity of opposites, the law of the mutual transformation of quantity into quality, the law of the negation of the negation, essence and appearance, basis and condition, form and content, chance and necessity, possiblity and reality, a critique of formal logic, and the process of cognition.
Mao’s personal copy of this volume has not survived, although Chinese Mao scholars believe it very likely that Mao did annotate it in the same manner as the two volumes previously discussed.[1-120] Indeed, it is largely on the basis of the similarity between Outline of New Philosophy and Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism that Schram and Wittfogel identified Mao’s reliance on Soviet sources to an extent tantamount to plagiarism.
However, the point that emerges from our brief comparison of the content of these three Soviet philosophical texts is the similarity of the material presented. Expositions of the fundamental laws and basic categories of dialectical materialism and critiques of formal logic appear in each of these texts. Almost identical expositions and critiques appear in Li Da’s Shehuixue dagang (Elements of Sociology), which Li modelled on Shirokov and Aizenberg’s A Course on Dialectical Materialism, and also in Ai Siqi’s Sixiang fangfalun (Methodology of thought) and Dazhong zhexue (Philosophy for the masses). These three texts by Chinese Marxist philosophers were also almost certainly employed by Mao in the preparation of his philosophical essays of 1937.[1-121] While it may be possible, therefore, to pinpoint passages in these texts which Mao inserted into his own writings on dialectical materialism, the importance of this exercise is overshadowed by the similarity of the content and style of language of all the sources employed, even when these were written by different authors. It is clear from a comparison of their writings that originality was not the issue, but the elaboration of the basic concepts and categories of dialectical materialism within the strict guidelines imposed by orthodoxy.
