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Teaching of Marxism in China By Chen Hong In recent decades the progress of Chinese society has aroused increasing interest among scholars of the most diverse persuasions. A certain slackening in the pace of economic advance in the last few years has done little to change the generally robust course of development. At the same time, the stand-off between China and the United States in the geopolitical and economic areas has attracted even greater attention to the question of how the social system of China, the country with the world’s second-ranking economy, functions and develops. It is important to stress that China’s leaders directly associate the country’s successes with the use of Marxist theory to solve practical problems. During Marx’s bicentenary year, 2018, particular attention was paid in China to the perspectives of Marxism as the theoretical paradigm and methodological basis for decisions in the field of state policy. Speaking in the Chamber of People’s Deputies on the eve of the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, the leader of the country, Xi Jinping, emphasized that Marxism has been a key component of China’s economic, social, political and cultural successes. Xi’s one-and-a-half-hour speech devoted to Marxism has become an important element in the development of sociological research in this country. The Second World Marxist Congress, which began the following day, brought together more than a thousand participants and became yet another visible confirmation of the fact that in China the development of Marxism is receiving priority attention. There are further facts as well that underline the important role played by Marxism in China, in the field of social research and also in the educational process. Particular evidence of this has been provided by the creation of faculties of Marxism — the so-called Institutes of Marxism — in China’s largest universities. Up to the present time more than a thousand of them have been established. In these institutions professional training for bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees has been placed on a high level, and is the object of special attention from the country’s leadership. A characteristic feature of the teaching of Marxism in China is the fact that scholars from many of the world’s countries have been drawn deliberately into the processes of instruction and of scholarly research. Among these scholars are people from the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and also post-Soviet Russia. One of the main texts on which the study of Marxism in China rests, apart from the works of Marx himself and those of Engels, Lenin, Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping, is the textbook An Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism, which is on the curriculum of all higher educational institutions. This textbook is based on the traditional logic of Marxism, which signifies a consistent examination of the historical setting and of the philosophical, political-economic and political science components of Marxism. In many respects the textbook is reminiscent of those published in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the epoch of so-called “developed socialism.” At the same time, it is clearly different from the Soviet textbooks and from previous textbooks on Marxism published in China, and it is on these differences, as well as on the peculiarities of this particular textbook, that we shall dwell hereafter. Anticipating the detailed description of the textbook, we would like to emphasiz that the basic textbook focuses on the general problems of Marxism, socialism and the communist perspective, without going into the details of research on various types of enterprises, organizations and institutions, since in modern China these are very diverse. These questions, as well as other more particular ones, are considered in numerous textbooks and support materials published by Chinese scientists. Before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the textbook, I will characterize its structure and main chapters. The textbook has a fairly detailed structure, including an Introduction and seven chapters, each of which consists of three sections. Chapters 1 and 2 address issues of the materiality of the world, dialectics and cognition. Chapter 3 presents the laws of social development, while chapters 4 and 5 address the essence and trends of development of capitalism, and chapters 6 and 7 cover the development of socialism and communist ideals. [For the full text, go to https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1521/siso.2020.84.3.420?download=true&;.] Sent from my iPhone _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
