Li Ta-Chao and the Chinese Communist Treatment of the Materialist Conception of History

Abstract

The traditional alliance between politics and scholarship that Professor Fitzgerald has referred to as “characteristically Chinese” has become a most explicit alliance in contemporary China. Not only is scholarship to serve immediate political interests, but it must do so within the frame-work of an all-pervasive ideology. In no field of scholarship is this union more explicit than in the study of history. The application of Marxist-Leninist theory and the “thought of Mao Tse-tung” to the study and understanding of the Chinese past is the appointed task of Chinese Communist historians, and they would no doubt be the first to acknowledge that historiography cannot, and indeed should not, be separated from ideology. The most relevant portion of this body of ideology for historians is, of course, the materialist conception of history. It is from the assumptions of this theory that the Chinese Communist interpretation of history ostensibly begins.