The version of Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism contained in the supplements to the Mao Zedong ji also contains On Contradiction and On Practice as integral parts of that text. The decision to separate them for purposes of translation may thus be queried, particularly as I have stressed throughout this Introduction that these do, as Schram has argued, belong to “a single intellectual enterprise”. However, the translations of On Contradiction and On Practice have a very different purpose to the translation of the Lecture Notes.
2. On Contradiction: The availability of the pre-Liberation version of On Contradiction (discovered in the late 1970s by Takeuchi Minoru) allows textual comparison with the post-Liberation official version to determine the extent of revision and additions to the earlier text before it was deemed suitable for publication as part of Mao’s Selected Works. This textual comparison has been performed in the translation of the pre-1949 text which appears in this anthology. A major purpose of this translation is to make as explicit as possible the points at which the pre-Liberation and official texts intersect and parallel each other, and where they diverge and differ. This has been achieved by two methods: (a) Points at which this text and the official text exactly parallel each other have been indicated by the use of bold type (for example, the principal contradiction). By this means, it is evident at a glance which sections of the pre-Liberation text have been incorporated into the official text. At such places where the two texts do exactly parallel each other, I have utilized without exception the official English translation.[1-171] This was felt necessary to facilitate comparison of the texts; moreover, the official English translation is, apart from a few minor exceptions, quite satisfactory and little would have been gained by its alteration, (b) Points at which the pre-Liberation text have been revised or added to on republication as the official text have been indicated by annotations appended to the end of the translation. The use of these two methods makes immediately evident the variations and similarities between the two texts.
3. On Practice: The translation of the pre-Liberation version of On Practice included in this volume is of the text contained in the supplements to the Mao Zedong ji. This is the text originally incorporated in Bianzheng weiwulun (Dialectical materialism) and published by Dazhong Shudian (no date of publication, but almost certainly 1946). As with the translation of On Contradiction, the purpose of this translation is to make as explicit as possible points of similarity and difference between the pre-1949 version of On Practice and the official post-Liberation text. Unlike the translation of On Contradiction, however, only sections not included in the official version have been indicated by the use of bold type. This reversal of the strategy used in the translation and annotation of On Contradiction was made necessary by the fact that there are far less differences between the pre- and post-Liberation versions of On Practice than is the case with On Contradiction. Annotations appended to the translation nevertheless disclose almost one hundred minor differences between the texts, a number of them of significant interest for an understanding of Mao’s epistemology. A number of minor differences between the two existing pre-Liberation versions of On Practice have also been noted. The official English translation contained in Mao’s Selected Works has been used as the basis for this translation.[1-172]
