The adventures of an ideology: Western Marxism in post-Mao China

Abstract

This article intends to bring to light the adventures of Western Marxism in China in the 1980s. It focuses on the philosophical ideas raised and illuminates the views of reformist and orthodox Marxists in the polemic about Western Marxism. I argue that in early 1989 the debate about Western Marxism had escalated into a fundamental challenge to the official ideology—a challenge that came to a sudden halt with the Tiananmen crackdown on 4 June 1989 and the chilling effect this event had on ideological discussion in ChinaThe Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1978 ushered in a decade of ideological fermentation in China that lasted until the Tiananmen crackdown on 4 June 1989. During this period, despite official campaigns against “bourgeois liberalization” and “spiritual pollution,” orthodox Marxism, understood by the CCP as Marxism-Leninism, became less sacrosanct. Discussions on various aspects of Marxism, in particular on “humanism” and “alienation,” captured the limelight in Chinese intellectual circles throughout much of the 1980s. Adhering to (jianchi) and developing (fazhan) Marxism in a new direction became leading themes among Chinese intellectuals.