QU QIUBAI’S READING OF MARXIAN “DIALECTICS”

Abstract

Western and Chinese intellectual traditions are in many ways different from each other. In their studies on correlative thinking in the Chinese tradition, David Hall and Roger Ames argue that the different cosmological assumptions of European cultures on the one hand and the autochthonous philosophical traditions of China on the other are greatly significant and worthy of scholarly attention. The kind of differences Hall and Ames point out may cause a large number of scholars in both the West and China to doubt that the two traditions can be fully understandable to each other in their own categories. My personal experience is that the more understanding gain of the Western intellectual tradition, the more realize that the differences between it and the Chinese tradition are more numerous and run deeper than had previously thought. Some outstanding ideas of the great thinkers in the Western tradition sometimes do not make too much sense to me. (For example, even now still have difficulties in experiencing the well-known thesis of Descartes I think, therefore am as a kind of exciting philosophy.) In the meantime, some ideas of the great thinkers in Chinese tradition have been read and interpreted very differently by various people. realize more and more that in many cases the knowledge gained of the ideas of Western thinkers when was in China was either inaccurate or very different from what read in the English texts when was abroad. Thus have come to believe that while gaining a better understanding of the link between the two cultural traditions is possible, misunderstandings and pitfalls also seem difficult to avoid. Here, would like to draw my colleagues' attention to the possibility that as a historical phenomenon of civilized engagement since the turn of the last century, the Chinese conversation with Marxism in the West is no exception. Many Chinese intellectuals may have since then come to understand Marxism in Chinese terms; and in the meantime, a surprisingly large number of writers have come to believe that Chinese Marxism can be understood fully in terms of Western categories. Many writers for example Stuart Schram, Joseph Needham, and Nick Knight have said that there is something distinctly Chinese about Chinese Marxism, but have failed to make clear what this implies, in terms of both what makes Chinese Marxism distinct, and of how Chinese Marxism differs from the one of Marx or of later Marxists.