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Feng Youlan and Dialectical/Historical Materialism, 1930s–1950s*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2015

XIAOQING DIANA LIN
XIAOQING DIANA LIN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Indiana University Northwest, United States of America Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the acceptance of Marxism by a non-Marxist Chinese philosopher, Feng Youlan, before and after 1949. Previous studies have largely focused on establishment intellectuals in the study of Marxism and intellectuals in China, and this article seeks to fill the lacuna on the intellectual potential Marxism offered to non-Communist intellectuals in China. This article finds that for Feng Youlan, a non-Marxist Chinese intellectual, Marxism was able to provide meaningful venues for his attempt to modernize Chinese knowledge and transform Chinese culture. A Marxist emphasis on universal rules governing all human societies on the same stage of development, Marxist presentist approaches to history, and most of all, a Marxist emphasis on praxis, aided Chinese intellectuals like Feng in constructing new approaches to learning the Chinese past. The Marxist emphasis on praxis helped deepen the discussion of experience, a concept central to a reconstruction of Confucian learning in modern China, after the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Eventually the state monopoly of the definition of Marxist praxis stifled the spontaneous search for a new understanding of experience in Communist China. Nonetheless, Marxism had a transformative and lasting impact on modern Chinese scholarship, as seen from the example of Feng Youlan.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 1050 - 1091
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I want to thank Arif Dirlik and Heidi Ross for suggestions for improvement on earlier versions of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive advice on revision. This article was first presented at a colloquium at Indiana University East Asian Studies Center in November 2011. I thank the participants at the colloquium for their comments. The research and writing of this article was funded by a New Frontiers research fellowship from Indiana University.

References

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