Let us pursue this issue of plagiarism a little further and explore how this might affect interpretation of Mao’s philosophical writings of 1937. The first point to be made is that the concept of plagiarism in the English language implies not only the borrowing of textual material from a source written by another, it also suggests intent to deceive the reader into believing that the borrowed material is one’s own. There can be no denying that the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism do indeed use a significant amount of material lifted wholesale from Chinese translations of the Soviet philosophical texts previously mentioned. In this sense there can be no doubt that an act of plagiarism took place. But did Mao consciously intend an act of deception, one in which his readers would be deceived into accepting the material from Soviet philosophical texts as his own? There are a number of considerations which suggest against such an interpretation. First, in the classical Chinese tradition, it was not at all common for an author to attribute his sources. The educated person was expected to be able to identify the text from which the saying or quote had been extracted. This practice undoubtedly extended into early Marxist writings in China, and it is one of the frustrations of working with such documents that sources of quotes or precis of another author’s views are not provided. It was a problem I encountered in the translation and annotation of not only the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism, but also the pre-Liberation text of On Contradiction. The sources of quotes had to be tracked down by sifting through texts by Engels, Lenin, and other authors from which the quotes may have been taken; but in these cases, no intention to deceive was ever suspected. This failure to identify the source of quotes or information is certainly not acceptable in the Western academic tradition as it has developed, but the judgement reserved for a Western academic writer who indulged in such a practice may not be entirely appropriate to a Chinese author, even as late as the 1930s, who did so. My suggestion here is that a condemnation of Mao for plagiarism in the second sense outlined above may rest on something of a cultural misunderstanding, and a failure to appreciate different cultural norms of academic propriety.
Second, the point needs to be emphasised that the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism were just that – lecture notes. The words “lecture notes” (jiangshou tigang) are clearly included in the title, and would warn the reader that the content of the document did not necessarily represent an original or highly polished contribution to the realm of intellectual inquiry of dialectical materialism. One also must recall the context within which these Lecture Notes were written. Mao was not, like Kant, involved in a lengthy period of isolated philosophical rumination. Rather, Mao was engaged in a protracted process of dialogue with colleagues and philosophers who were close to hand in the far from private world of Yan’an. A group of Party members with a bent toward philosophy developed around Mao, and Mao was later to institutionalise this study group (either towards the end of 1937 or the beginning of 1938),[1-122] meeting initially in Mao’s own office on three nights a week. Seven or eight attended (probably including Ai Siqi, Zhou Yang, He Sijing, Ren Beigou, Pei Yuan, and Chen Boda),[1-123] and the subjects discussed were the various laws of dialectical materialism and aspects of dialectical materialism generally. In a context such as this, could Mao hope to get away with a conscious act of plagiarism in which deception was intended, when there were those present (like Ai Siqi) whose familiarity with the philosophy of dialectical materialism was far more advanced than Mao’s, and who in fact had been responsible for translating into Chinese some of the texts which Mao relied on? It seems hardly likely.[1-124]
