The issue of plagiarism in the case of the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism is also important as it raises the question of the degree of influence of Soviet philosophy on Mao’s two better-known philosophical essays, On Contradiction and On Practice, and the extent of Mao’s textual reliance on these sources in their writing. After all, the three essays are, as Schram has argued, part of a “single intellectual enterprise”, written at the same time, under the same influences, and in the same historical context. If one chooses to look hard at the Soviet texts mentioned before and the works of philosophy created by Ai Siqi and Li Da during the early to mid-1930s, one is struck by the wealth of material there on the issues of dialectics, contradiction, and epistemology couched in terms remarkably similar to that employed by Mao in his own essays. However, if one pursues this line of reasoning to its apparently logical conclusion, what is the result? The result is that one ends with Wittfogel, asserting Chinese Marxism to be nothing more than an imitation and extension of Soviet and orthodox Marxism, and therefore entirely consonant with Soviet political ambitions;[1-128] or with Cohen, decrying any claim by Mao or Chinese Marxism to “originality”, perceiving there nothing but second-hand ideas dressed up as new wares.[1-129] Both of these positions, I believe, prevent a constructive and sensitive approach to an understanding of the theoretical influences which gave rise to Mao Zedong’s philosophical thought and Chinese Marxism, and to their subsequent development. For the point remains that influence and source are not the equivalent of subsequent development. Were they to be so, the realm of intellectual history would amount to nothing more than the reduction of a thinker to his or her sources and influences; the exercise would be limited to a compilation of these, and originality, innovation, and development would disappear from view. And yet there is more to the comprehension of thought, and particularly bodies of thought, than this.
My purpose is thus not to replicate the perspectives of Wittfogel and Cohen. Nevertheless, because of die exaggerated tendency within Western Mao studies to regard Mao’s Marxism as having achieved a decisive break from more orthodox forms of Marxism,[1-130] I believe it essential to return to the issue of sources and to reopen the debate on Mao’s own debt to Soviet philosophy of the 1930s; and part of this debate inevitably concerns the problem of plagiarism. Where does plagiarism start and where does it finish? Does it involve only the direct appropriation of words used in another source; does it extend (as Wittfogel implies) to summarising a passage in one’s own words; or can it be applied more generally, to indicate a reliance on or utilisation of the ideas (if not the exact words) to be found in another source? These questions are not merely rhetorical, for if we are to bring On Contradiction and On Practice under the spotlight and submit them to the same critical scrutiny as the Lecture Notes, then we may find that these two essays, without doubt the cornerstone of Chinese Marxist philosophy, bear more than just a passing similarity to the sources Mao was employing in 1936‒37. But does this imply that there is nothing original to be found in these essays? A balanced response to this question can be gained through a consideration of recent discussions of this issue by Mao specialists in China.
Since Mao’s death, scholarship on his philosophical thought in China has pursued a more independently critical path than previously. While maintaining the overwhelming significance of Mao’s writings on philosophy for the development of Chinese Marxist philosophy generally, Chinese Mao scholars have subjected his philosophical writings of 1937 to detailed and critical comparison with the texts on philosophy which constituted his major influence. This exercise has been facilitated by the publication of the annotations and marginal notes which Mao inscribed on these philosophical texts. In the context of looking closely at his sources of influence and his immediate response to them in the form of his annotations and marginalia, Chinese Mao scholars have inevitably posed the question I have raised above: to what extent were On Contradiction and On Practice reliant on Soviet texts on philosophy and those of Li Da and Ai Siqi? The response to this question is instructive.
