China and the West

[Marxismus 1917-1949].
The Chinese revolution was not only a local and nationalist movement, but also a significant part of international revolutionary movement initiated by the Russian revolution of 1917. Certainly, there were fundamental differences between the Chinese and Russian revolutions. The Chinese revolution as primarily a peasant one, centered in the backward rural areas. The Russian revolution was city-based, led by a revolutionary vanguard, mobilized a well-organized urban proletariat. For Vladimir Lenin, revolution was primarily a political event, directed by a politically and ideologically sophisticated elite. But for the Chinese communists, revolution was at once political, social, and cultural. Unlike the Russia of prerevolutionary days, when objective conditions were considered ripe by the Leninist leadership, the Chinese revolution had to generate its own revolutionary momentum. At the time, China was dominated by a powerful alliance of warlords and Western imperialists, and the existence of bourgeoisie and urban proletarians was negligible. This rendered China fragmented, decentralized, and tension filled, but also made a well-organized urban revolutionary insurgence impossible.
If the Russian revolution was a socialist revolution largely within the Western hemisphere or capitalist system, the Chinese revolution, and revolutions in the rest of the 'Third world', were much more complicated. The Chinese revolution was definitely a socialist, nationalist, and anti-imperialist struggle. Moreover, the Chinese revolution was conceived of as a way to bring about modernity, with the manifest goal of establishing a socialist alternative modernity instead of a capitalist one.

The universalist and totalizing claims of the May fourth intellectuals reflect the awareness of China's social change as an integral part of a global modernity. To be sure, there were inherent connections between the forms of May fourth cultural radicalism and iconoclasm, and the deep-seated 'Chinese cultural predisposition' or 'monistic and intellectualistic mode of thinking'. But it is equally undeniable, and far more significant, that this radicalism fundamentally transformed traditional values, to which radical intellectuals themselves were thoroughly indebted. Marxism represents the single most powerful intellectual, ideological, and political force in modern China, not only contributing to the radicalization and diffusion of China's social formations, but also to the spatial and temporal fragmentation of Marxism itself as both a product and critique of Western capitalist modernity.

While national salvation was certainly a high priority of the Chinese revolution, however, the enlightenment project already assumed a new objective in the Revolution : to create a new revolutionary subjectivity. This was markedly different from that of the bourgeois enlightenment advocated by Liang Qichao and Cai Yuanpei. The formation of a Marxist aesthetics in China was related to at least three complex aspects of global modernity : the universalism embedded in Chinese cultural tradition ; modern European humanist thought since the Enlightenment ; and Marxist traditions around the world. Chinese intellectuals turned toward European Enlightenment thought for new ways of reestablishing universality, viewing it as truly global and universal. They tried to free themselves from a narrowly defined, ethnocentric perspective, and genuinely believed that the European Enlightenment brought the hope of real universality for all humanity. This trend was well demonstrated in the thoughts of Liang Qichao and Cai Yuanpei, representing emergent bourgeois liberalism and humanism in China.
Marxism provided the Chinese intellectuals with an alternative solution to the predicament of modernity by way of as social and political revolution that would change China's social structure and culture. This change was meant to be systematic and fundamental, in keeping with the Marxist vision of a transformation of all societies in the world. Thus, Marxist aesthetics in China was crucially related to the Chinese revolution in two senses : as a utopian discourse legitimating a socialst and communist universality, of which the Chinese revolution was an integral part, and as a hegemonic discourse in constructing a new culture and revolutionary subjectivity. Two other crucial aspects further complicated the nature of the Chinese revolution. The first has to do with urban Marxist intellectuals, who were champions and heirs of the May fourth legacy, and pioneers of the Marxist movement in China. Lu Xun's aesthetic thought is arguably the most sophisticated of the urban Marxists. His aesthetic views are expressed primarily through his allegorical writings. Lu Xun became a committed Marxist arround the turn of the 1930s. This was a time of crisis for the revolution, after the revolutionary alliance between Guomindang and the CCP broke up, and Chiang Kaishek began to round up and massacre his former communist allies in the 'reign of white terrer'. Lu Xun's conversion to Marxism was significant. As perhaps the most outspoken critical intellectual of the May fourth movement, his turn suggested a decidedly left-wing, pro-Marxist transition among a majority of May fourth intellectuals. Lu Xun's acceptance of Marxism also affected the revolution, in the sense that his influential work much enhanced the cultural struggles in the overall revolutionary movement. In Shanghai, a small yet highly energetic and dedicated group of left-wing writers gathered around Lu Xun. They and other factions of left-wing authors had miraculously effected a kind of 'Marxist turn' in Shanghai's cultural and intellectual scene in the early 1930s, when Chiang Kaishek virtually eliminated all communist activity in major cities and pushed CCP revolutonaries into the peripheral, impoverished rural regions of Jiangxi. One can view Lu Xun's acceptance of Marixsm as a dialectical process, bringing his subjective dispositions and personal psychic structures into dynamic interplay with social condistions and structures. Lu Xun took Marxism not only as an ideological guide for his politics, but also a scientific, epistemological guide for understanding the world. He advocated cultural revolution as a Marxist. He quoted Lenin to argue that without a change in attitudes and modes of behavior, the goal of revolution would never be accomplished. Lu Xun's understanding was largely acquired through Russian Marxists such as Lenin, Trotsky and Plekhanov, he was generally unaware of contemporary works by German Marxists, with the exception of Karl Wittfogel.

As both a major CCP leader and Marxist theorist, Qu Qiubai contributed significantly to Chinese Marxism in two ways : he critiqued the Europeanization of the May fourth movement, and developed both a theory and practice of building a revolutionary national-popular culture. Qu's career as a writer and critic began with hist participation in Marxist movements. His writings on Russia and its leaders, including Lenin, whom he met on several occasions, aroused immediate excitement when they were published and had a lasting impact on China. Qu was ousted from his position in 1931. Withdrawing from political activity, he went to Shanghai, occupying himself exclusively with cultural and literary issues. During this period, he wrote profusely on Marxist cultural and easthetic theories, and literary criticism, in addition, he composed numerous zawen essays, and translated Russian Marxist literary theory and criticism. Qu's critique of Europeanization was derived from the classical Marxist category of class and the historical stages of progress, he was able to grasp the historical totality at the conjuncture of fragmentation and dislocation. The social reality that Qu faced was certainly different from today's advanced capitalism in the West. He frequently invoked the classical Marxist teleological notion of irreversible and unsurpassable stages in history. He maintained that 'Marxists differ from unscientific narodniks and anarchists in that they entertain no illusion at all of bypassing capitalism and arriving directly at socialism. There is only one way to socialism, that is, to carry out class struggle on the basis of capitalism. Qu mercilessly chastised the pretentiousness of Europeanized intellectuals even when they converted to Marxism. In his view, Marxism itself could not redeem them from the self-imposed 'epistemic violence' of the Western hegemonic discourse. For Marxism, he continued in his second stunning blast against Europeanization, appealed to the May fourth intellectuals precisely because it was the latest fashion of Westernization. Marxism was accepted by the Europeanizers as an ideology of Western modernity, yet as a constituent of Western epistemic violence, it could only perpetuate China's social problems. The Marxist-oriented revolutionary and proletarian literature that 'emerged from the May fourth foundation', Qu argued, 'simply offered the Europeanized gentry yet another sumptuous banquet to satisfy their new tastes, while the laboring people were still starving. Qu's main episteme was the Marxist notion of class analysis, which offers little of the theoretical ambiguity and sophistication that characterize poststructuralism. The crucial concept of class, however, did not appear reductionist or dogmatic in Qu's exposition, but rather polysemic and often self-contradictory. Qu introduced to Chinese Marxism the idea of a revoltion that would begin in cultural spheres, a revolution in which cultural change, as opposed to political or economic transformation, would be primary. The revolution in the cities was suppressed and had to shift its base to the impoverished rural areas ; at the same time, the left-wing urban intelligentsia took a 'Marxist turn' in the midst of the counterrevolutionary white terror. The urgent task for Qu, then, was to bring together the two revolutionary forces - the urban Marxist intellectuals and rural peasantry - under the hegemony of the proletariat. In his 'Draft postscripts on Marxist aesthetics' Qu stressed the significant role that culture and consicousness play in social revolution. He argued that under China's specific circumstances, revolutionary breakthrough might first occur in the superstructural realms, before social and economic transformations. He rejected the need to construct a bourgeois culture in China as an inevitable step, promoting cultural revolution as a means to subvert and go beyond bourgeois cultural hegemony.

Mao Zedong saw the Chinese revolution as 'following the path of the Russians'. The Russian revolution, by waging a socialist revolution in an economically backward country, broke the teleology envisaged by classical Marxism. This was both an inspiration and justification for the Chinese communists, whose peasant revolution in a non-Western, agrarian society would constitute no less significant a beach than the Russian revolution to Marxist teleology. Classical Marxists could only conceive of a socialist revolution in the highly industrialized, advanced capitalist countries of the West, and hardly ever thought of the non-west as a possible site for revolution. White Russia was almost at the periphery of Eurocentric thinking, to which Marx remained captive, China was positively removed, and Marx's only serious reflection on China was cast in a rather ambiguous double bind. Marx did not want to follow Hegel's etnocentric notion to deny China a history outright, but he could not find a proper place in history for China, except in an indeterminate and vauge 'Asiatic mode of production'.
In his Talks at the Yan'an forum Mao Zedong argued that urban Marxist intellectuals should come to understand that their passage from Shanghai to Yan'an 'involved not just two different localities but wo different historical eras. One is a semifeudal, semicolonial society ruled by big landlords and the big bourgeoisie ; the other is a revolutionary new democratic society under the leadership of the proletariat. To arrive in a revoltionary base area is to arrive in a dynasty, unprecedented in thousands of years of Chinese history, a dynasty were workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the popular masses hold power.