Philosophy and Politics in China: The Controversy Over Dialectical Materialism in the 1930s

The philosophical basis for the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party is dialectical materialism. The general, definitive version never superseded up till the present, is set out in the works On Practice and On Contradiction, of which Mao Tse-tung is officially named as author in China. The present work sets out to open up the sources from which Chinese dialectical materialism originated. The path to these sources leads to Shanghai in the 1930's, where a philosophical controversy raged among intellectuals with a leftist orientation. The object of this contraversy was the New Philosophy, identical to Soviet dialectical materialism, of which the literature has been translated into Chinese since the early 1930s.