Modernization of Marxism in Modern China: Alternative Philosophical and Social Studies Interpretations Cover Image

Modernization of Marxism in Modern China: Alternative Philosophical and Social Studies Interpretations
Modernization of Marxism in Modern China: Alternative Philosophical and Social Studies Interpretations

Author(s): Vyacheslav Vilkov
Subject(s): Political Philosophy, Marxism, East Asian Philosophy
Published by: Международное философско-космологическое общество
Keywords: Chinese Marxism; Chineseization of Marxism; Chineseized Marxism; Marxism-Leninism (Soviet Marxism); modernization of Marxist doctrine; Sun Weiping; Li Junzhu;

Summary/Abstract: To analyse the processes of development of Marxist philosophical and socio-political doctrine in China in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; to systematically reconstruct the peculiarities of the interpretation of its axiomatics by modern Chinese researchers; to determine the main trends, goals and objectives of modernization and Chineseization of Marxism in the People’s Republic of China; to reveal the attributive features of the ideological, theoretical, methodological and ideological foundations of those innovative approaches and narratives for the renewal of Marxist philosophy and social studies, which are offered by representatives of the modern scientific community of Chinese philosophers, political scientists, historians and may become paradigmatic in this century. The main research methods were systemic, structural-functional, comparative, discursive, content analysis, and prescriptions of the general scientific principles of Scientism and Historicism. Based on the analysis of the publications of modern Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian researchers, theoretical reconstruction of the specifics of the development of Marxist philosophical and socio-political doctrine in China in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is proposed; the influence of objective and subjective factors on them is characterized. Among them, the greatest attention was paid to the conceptual reflection of how the needs for the fundamental and large-scale modernization of Chinese society necessitated the revision and updating of the diamat-istmat version of Marxism, which, by the early 1960s, had become conservative, orthodox and scholastic, turned into a paradigm in the scientific environment of Soviet-style states, and into metanarrative in the political system of the People’s Republic of China (as well as in the USSR). The author provides a generalized analytical assessment of alternative options for updating the model of Marxist philosophy and the complex of socio-political sciences that are dominant in the People’s Republic of China; the reasons and internal logic of their modernization are revealed on the basis of which the permissible and possible directions, prospects, and limits of ideological, theoretical-methodological and ideological reforming of Marxism in China are determined.

  • Issue Year: 10/2022
  • Issue No: 10
  • Page Range: 69-84
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: English