Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency translation, dated 1 August 1988, collects Chinese articles on theory and policy. Its main item is a 1979 Shanghai forum speech by Wang Ruoshui, which argues that Marxist theory has to be tested and developed in practice, and that Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought should be open to criticism. The collection also covers how urban population is defined, a Fudan University seminar on the crisis in Marxist philosophy, and political security for theorists. Unidentified flying objects come up only as a passing example of a concept.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
the truth so that we can seek and understand the truth freely and independently. The purpose of ideological liberation is to understand the truth and the criterion of truth is practice. As long as we recognize this rule, we would not have to worry about the problem of overdoing in ideological liberation. Today, we still need to liberate our thinking. Some comrades asked me how to explain democracy as a means. If democracy is a means, so is dictatorship. We have no reason to belittle the importance of democracy just because we think it as a means. Is dictatorship a means? Yes, it is also a means. As Marx said, dictatorship is a medium to ultimately eliminate classes. If we can stress the means of dictatorship, why can't we stress the means of democracy? This is the first question. The second question is that a means and an end are relative and can be transformed. For instance, when we were opposing the Kuomintang, we fought for democracy which was our end; after we won democracy, we used it to build socialism and democracy became a means. At the present, democracy, I think, is both a means and an end because we still need to develop socialist democracy so we can use it to arouse the people's enthusiasm for the cause of the four modernizations. ## On the Issue of Chairman Mao's Philosophical Thinking How do we look at Chairman Mao's philosophical thinking? What are his contributions and shortcomings? I can only talk about it briefly because I am not prepared and don't have any reference materials. I can only say a few things based on my memory. While discussing these issues, including Chairman Mao's theories on epistemology and contradictions, we should go far back to the philosophical difference between Chairman Mao and Stalin. Lenin wrote "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" which was the first Marxist classic to discuss mainly epistemology. No book was devoted to the discussion of epistemology before then. However, this book is to resolve the issue of materialism and criticize idealism. It also talks about the dialectics of epistemology, but not much. It mainly answers questions such as what is primary and what is secondary. Later he began to write "Notes on Philosophy" and learned Hegel's science of logic. He finished writing outlines and introduced many thinkings. It looked like he was ready to write another book on philosophy, but he did not have enough time to do so. In his "Notes on Philosophy," Lenin had two Ideas: one is to summarize the gist of dialectics into the unity of opposites, thus getting to the heart of the issue, which however should be explained and expanded on; the other is to apply dialectics to the theory of reflection. In addition, he also said that the road to knowledge is from vivid perception to abstract thinking and then from thinking to practice. For a long time in the Soviet Union, Ideas like this failed to attract Stalin's attention. Since Stalin looked down on Hegel and dialectics, for a long time the Soviet Union attached much importance to "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" but did not give due attention to "Notes on Philosophy." Under Soviet influence, China also attached importance to "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" and ignored "Notes on Philosophy." "Notes on Philosophy" is only notes not a book but it contains the embryos of many valuable ideas. However, Chairman Mao inherited and developed these ideas first by expanding on Lenin's remark on the unity of the opposites into an article, entitled "The Theory of Contradictions" and, second, by expanding Lenin's idea on the process of cognition into an article, entitled "The Theory of Practice." Chairman Mao's articles were written in 1937, and "The Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" was published in 1938. Stalin wrote one of the chapters, entitled "Dialectical and Historical Materialism" which exerted great influence and played a great part. This article expounds on the general guidelines of the tenets of Marxist philosophy in simple and clear language and carries a certain amount of weight. However, it also has several mistakes which I will not discuss at length today. One of the mistakes is, as everybody knows, that when he discussed the four characteristics of dialectics, he only mentioned that the struggle of opposites in contradictions pushes things to move forward. Lenin's original remarks were two sentences: one was "development is the identity of opposites" and the other was "development is the struggle of opposites." Stalin used only the second sentence and dropped the first one. Another thing about his article is that it did not give enough coverage to the issue of epistemology. As if epistemology is merely an issue of the knowability and unknowability of the world, he said that the materialism thinks the world is knowable and idealism thinks the world is unknowable. And that is all he said about the issue of epistemology. Earlier in 1937, Chairman Mao already elaborated on this issue; so it is in these areas that Chairman Mao inherited and developed Lenin's thinking and these are also Chairman Mao's contributions. Lenin's original remarks on the process from vivid perception to abstract thinking and then from abstract thinking to practice later aroused some questions. For example, how many stages are there in the process of cognition? One group says there are two: one is perceptual and the other, rational. They say according to "The Theory of Practice," knowledge is perceptual in the lower stage and rational in the higher stage; so there are two stages. Another group says there are three stages, contending that rational knowledge is not the end of the process and that there should be another stage for the testing of practice, which is also what Chairman Mao said. Rational knowledge, which is only the half point in the process of cognition, needs to go back to the stage of practice. This is the continuous development of knowledge. What is our answer to this question? Chairman Mao elborated on this issue in his work "Where Does Man's Correct Thinking Come From" where he said that one
Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 10 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.