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Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism
Book by Meisner, Maurice
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
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About the author
Maurice J. Meisner
8 books19 followersMaurice Jerome Meisner was an historian of 20th century China and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 15, 2023
A classic study of one of the great yet obscure figures of the early Chinese Marxist tradition, one which holds up surprisingly well. Although Meisner's grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory is less than ideal, interpreting it as a somewhat static dogma from which any deviation is automatically a "contradiction" rather than a practical modification, he provides an account of Li Dazhao's life and thought in great detail, alongside a copious amount of quotes for which I thank him (a gripe of mine with Sinologists). His work makes me want to get back into translating. May write a longer review soon.
December 27, 2024
Li Dazhao is famous as one of the first of the New Culture intellectuals to pronounce themselves for Bolshevism (in November 1918, in his article "The Victory of Bolshevism") and Marxism (in May 1919 in "My Marxist Views"), and as one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (in July 1921, although he didn't attend in person). He is also noted as being the mentor to a young Mao Zedong, who was the assistant librarian at Peking University, where Li was head librarian, during the winter of 1918-19, and therefore is considered as the source of many of the unique elements of chinese Marxism which came to be associated with Mao. These are specifically, an orientation towards the peasantry as a revolutionary class (usually assocaited with Mao's March 1927 "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" but anticipated by an article by Li in February 1919 calling on young Chinese intellectuals to "go to the villages"), Chinese nationalism and popular-frontism (usually associated more with Mao's "new democracy" as formulated in 1940 based on the experience of the Yan'an Soviet and the second united front, but also present in a somewhat contradictory form in Li's view of China as a "proletarian nation" in his article of January 1920 "An Economic Explanation of the Causes of the Changes in Modern Chinese Thought", and political voluntarism (usually associated with the slogan of "poltics in command" and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, but anticipated by about everything Li ever wrote both before and after he became a communist).
Just as interesting as the posthumous influence of Li (he died in 1927 in the immediate aftermath of the Shanghai massacre, long before the Zunyi conference of 1935 during the long march when Mao became the undisputed leader of the CCP), are Li's own influences. The New Culture movement was after all an apreciation by Chinese intellectuals of western liberal and positivist thinking (Darwin, Mill, Huxley, Spencer). This was before the May Fourth movement in response to the Treaty of Versailles which turned young Chinese intellectuals onto those strains of western thought which where critical of their own tradition (Saint-Simon, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Russell as a socialist, GDH Cole, Marx, Lenin). The thinkers that appealed most to Li from the west before the May Fourth movement were the vitalist Henri Bergson and the transcedentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Regarding the question of its impact on the development of Marxism, Bergson is perhaps the more intruging, leaving already a well-known imprint on the thought of Sorel and Lukacs.
Bergson is famous as a critic of scientific rationalism and positivism, especially those high modernist forms of thinking that would read time in space. For Bergson any overly deterministic system of history is a denial of life that deadens the creative potentialities of individuals. In his pre-marxist phase, Li utilised Bergson for political means in "Pessimism and Self-Conciousness" from August 1915. Arguing against Chen Duxiu, a future comrade within the CCP who came to represent an opposing strain of Chinese Marxism, on the question of nationalism Li argued "We cannot view theories in a kind of pessimistic and deterministic manner that weakens the spirit of struggling forward. It is necessary to employ the theory of free will, to exert efforts to move forward and develop, in order to change the situation to suit our will." Despite the absense of any mention of Sorel in this book, presumably Li had not read him, this is precisely the same argument Sorel made about historical materialism being a shackle on the creative potentialities of the working class. Although both were voluntarists, a crucial difference is that Li used this Bergsonian way of thinking not just in support of class struggle, but also in support of the myth of nationalism. As Li put it "A country is a creation of men (...) to change the nation, how can this done without the patriotism of the people?" Therefore the voluntaristic and nationalist Li's conversion to the historical materialist and internationalist creed of Marxism in 1918 is rather ironic. Li was not convinced of Marxism on the base of its arguments alone, but rather was impressed by the creative powers unleashed by the bolshevik revolution in Russia. The rest of Li's intellectual career was engaged in making cohere these two oppositional creeds, on one hand Marx and the other Bergson.
The third unique element of Li's (and Mao's) marxism was the primary position of the peasantry in the revolutionary schedule for China. Like Russia, China was a majority peasant society. One could compare the politics of Li and Mao in this regard to the Left SRs, in that they both saw the peasants as both holding something true and untarnished of the soul of the nation that would be responsible for its regeneration. Li was familiar with the Russian populists and viewed them highly, especially for their heroic acts. Li's veneration of the pesantry also had something in common with earlier European liberalism with its ideas of natural man. In his article from 1913 "The Great Grief" he lamented that the "people" had lost their "natural freedom of social relationships" which had been usurped by "those who rule the state".
Opposed to Li was Chen Duxiu. Whereas Li was voluntaristic, nationalistic, and rural, Chen was deterministic, internationalist, and urban. Although Chen was closer to the orthodox Marxism of the second international, the rural revolts of the 20s and requirements of the Comintern to form an alliance with the Kuomintang made it inevitable that Chen and his faction would eventually fall from power. Although Li was strangled to death in 1927 by warlord thugs, his ideas came to rule the development of the CCP, Maoism and ultimately modern China. Chen survived the massacres of 1927, yet languished in obscurity for the rest of his life.
Just as interesting as the posthumous influence of Li (he died in 1927 in the immediate aftermath of the Shanghai massacre, long before the Zunyi conference of 1935 during the long march when Mao became the undisputed leader of the CCP), are Li's own influences. The New Culture movement was after all an apreciation by Chinese intellectuals of western liberal and positivist thinking (Darwin, Mill, Huxley, Spencer). This was before the May Fourth movement in response to the Treaty of Versailles which turned young Chinese intellectuals onto those strains of western thought which where critical of their own tradition (Saint-Simon, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Russell as a socialist, GDH Cole, Marx, Lenin). The thinkers that appealed most to Li from the west before the May Fourth movement were the vitalist Henri Bergson and the transcedentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Regarding the question of its impact on the development of Marxism, Bergson is perhaps the more intruging, leaving already a well-known imprint on the thought of Sorel and Lukacs.
Bergson is famous as a critic of scientific rationalism and positivism, especially those high modernist forms of thinking that would read time in space. For Bergson any overly deterministic system of history is a denial of life that deadens the creative potentialities of individuals. In his pre-marxist phase, Li utilised Bergson for political means in "Pessimism and Self-Conciousness" from August 1915. Arguing against Chen Duxiu, a future comrade within the CCP who came to represent an opposing strain of Chinese Marxism, on the question of nationalism Li argued "We cannot view theories in a kind of pessimistic and deterministic manner that weakens the spirit of struggling forward. It is necessary to employ the theory of free will, to exert efforts to move forward and develop, in order to change the situation to suit our will." Despite the absense of any mention of Sorel in this book, presumably Li had not read him, this is precisely the same argument Sorel made about historical materialism being a shackle on the creative potentialities of the working class. Although both were voluntarists, a crucial difference is that Li used this Bergsonian way of thinking not just in support of class struggle, but also in support of the myth of nationalism. As Li put it "A country is a creation of men (...) to change the nation, how can this done without the patriotism of the people?" Therefore the voluntaristic and nationalist Li's conversion to the historical materialist and internationalist creed of Marxism in 1918 is rather ironic. Li was not convinced of Marxism on the base of its arguments alone, but rather was impressed by the creative powers unleashed by the bolshevik revolution in Russia. The rest of Li's intellectual career was engaged in making cohere these two oppositional creeds, on one hand Marx and the other Bergson.
The third unique element of Li's (and Mao's) marxism was the primary position of the peasantry in the revolutionary schedule for China. Like Russia, China was a majority peasant society. One could compare the politics of Li and Mao in this regard to the Left SRs, in that they both saw the peasants as both holding something true and untarnished of the soul of the nation that would be responsible for its regeneration. Li was familiar with the Russian populists and viewed them highly, especially for their heroic acts. Li's veneration of the pesantry also had something in common with earlier European liberalism with its ideas of natural man. In his article from 1913 "The Great Grief" he lamented that the "people" had lost their "natural freedom of social relationships" which had been usurped by "those who rule the state".
Opposed to Li was Chen Duxiu. Whereas Li was voluntaristic, nationalistic, and rural, Chen was deterministic, internationalist, and urban. Although Chen was closer to the orthodox Marxism of the second international, the rural revolts of the 20s and requirements of the Comintern to form an alliance with the Kuomintang made it inevitable that Chen and his faction would eventually fall from power. Although Li was strangled to death in 1927 by warlord thugs, his ideas came to rule the development of the CCP, Maoism and ultimately modern China. Chen survived the massacres of 1927, yet languished in obscurity for the rest of his life.
August 4, 2020
In the introduction the author reveals that his views on Chinese Marxism are sceptical to negative so I was concerned that this would effect the quality of the book, but it was actually really informative and interesting, even if it does call Leninism in general even and not just the Chinese form of Marxism-Leninism revisionist.
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October 8, 2017He was even more cool and interesting than I expected.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews