Zhang Cheng, "China as Center and Method"

Zhang Cheng, “The Methodology of the Chinese Path:  China as Center and Method”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Zhang Cheng is a young professor in the history section of the Central Party School in Beijing.  The Central Party School is not part of official propaganda system in China, and hence the text translated here raises the question of how public intellectuals interpret propaganda themes for the broader public, although we can generally assume that the effort is not necessarily problematic for someone whose job it is to train CCP cadres.
 
Zhang’s text revisits the time-worn question of Chinese knowledge versus Western knowledge in the context of modern and contemporary Chinese history.  In a nutshell, before the Opium War, China was both center and method, in that China’s focus was on China, and China understood the world through a lens of Chinese theory (the “yi-xia/Chinese-barbarian distinction, i.e., the idea that Chinese and outsiders were distinct, but in moral/civilizational and not racial terms, and the border between the two was porous, with transformations in both directions possible).  Following the shock of the Opium War, some Chinese began to acknowledge the technical superiority of the West, and the situation shifted to one of “China as center and West as method,” often expressed through the well-known expression "Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as application 中学为体，西学为用." 
 
This formula proved incapable of effecting China’s salvation, and the Republican period saw the rise of a situation of “West as center and West as method,” in the guise of “total Westernizers” like Hu Shi, or “total Sovietizers” like the dogmatic Russian-returned students who dominated the CCP before Mao Zedong seized power.  Once established in Yan’an, Mao began working against this “total Sovietization” by attempting in various ways to sinicize Marxism or to conceive of a Marxism that would respect “national forms.”  He succeeded in reestablishing “China as center,” but during much of the early history of the PRC, the prestige of Stalin and the Soviet Union meant that the USSR continued to function as method.
 
China as both center and method is finally returning under Xi Jinping, who, like Mao Zedong, is open to the positive aspects of Chinese tradition and “national forms,” and who preaches the value of cultural self-confidence.  This confidence means, however, that China will not return to the blinkered condition of the pre-Opium War period.  China is now a proud part of the world, and will continue to learn from others even as she teaches.
 
Compared to other texts I have read and translated over the past few years, Zhang Cheng’s stands out for its attention to Mao Zedong and especially Yan’an; in texts translated on my site, Mao is mentioned many times, if more often than not merely in passing, while Yan’an is mentioned only twice.  It has often struck me that Mao, the Yan’an period, and the Chinese revolution(s) in general are topics that the establishment intellectuals I read would rather avoid.  This is understandable in that these are sensitive topics that may well land an author in hot water, but at the same time, any effort to recast modern Chinese history, or to create new founding myths for the current Chinese experience, which does not talk about Mao, Yan’an, and the Chinese revolution(s) must surely be incomplete, and I have generally understood these silences as implicit repudiations.  Without calling out these silent intellectuals, Zhang’s text is surely meant as a reminder that China’s revolutionary history is a core fact in China’s modern experience that demands respect.
 
Of course, Zhang’s text has its own silences.  Reform and opening is mentioned only in passing, perhaps because it is not clear where market forces and globalization fit in the discussion of “center and method.”  Neither is Xi Jinping’s “method” discussed at length.  I find Jiang Shigong’s defense of Xi Jinping thought more convincing on both fronts, at least in the sense that he honestly confronts the issues. 
 
To my mind, Zhang’s goal in presenting Xi Jinping as having achieved Mao’s incomplete sinicization of Marxism is to highlight the importance of Mao, and even more, the importance of Marxism to China’s past, present, and future.  As Zhang puts it:
 
“The purpose of Xi Jinping's ‘cultural gene’ theory is to emphasize the great importance that he attaches to the relationship between Marxism and Chinese civilization, which is related to the question of the methodology employed in the theoretical construction of the sinicization of Marxism. Marxism's sinicization is not a simple theoretical structure of 'content plus form,' with Marxism as the content and Chinese civilization as the form, in which Marxism 'transforms' China and China 'transforms' Marxism….The combination of the two arrives at a new type of theoretical construct containing both Marxist guidance and the Chinese cultural standpoint.”
 
In other words, Marxism is incomprehensible and incomplete without China, just as China is incomprehensible and incomplete without Marxism.  And who best understands Marxism and China—and the intermingling of the two?  Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, of course.

Note:  Mao Zedong is cited frequently in this text.  When I could find them, I used standard translations from Mao's Selected Works, but in many instances, the author did not indicate the title of the text from which the quote was taken, and in such cases, I did my own translation.  If readers can identify these titles, I will be happy to replace my translations with the standard ones.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“The Opium War was indeed a watershed for ‘China-centeredness,’ because prior to this point, whether it was a case of a foreign civilization, like Buddhism, or alien regimes such as those represented by Yuan and Qing dynasties, all such things entered China as a form of conquest, yet in the process were gradually sinicized, meaning that China always remained the center. After the Opium War, however, the situation changed qualitatively, and the invaders were no longer sinicized. As the historian Joseph Levenson (1920-1969) once noted: ‘China could be controlled from afar, which meant that modern Europeans, unlike the Manchus, could avoid being assimilated.  Because of the backwardness of their technology, the Chinese could not bring the Europeans into their own society, nor could they drive them out.’"
 
“To grasp Chinese problems and to understand revolutionary practice, Mao always insisted on the agency of Chinese people, ‘The victory of the Chinese revolutionary struggle depends on our Chinese comrades' understanding of the Chinese situation.’ After a long revolutionary struggle, Mao Zedong was convinced of this. ‘Over the course of his life, Marx was unable to foresee and solve all the problems that would emerge in the future. Russia’s problems could only be solved by Lenin, and China’s problems can only be solved by the Chinese people.’ During the Yan'an rectification period, Mao abhorred the dogmatists who ignored Chinese questions and could only talk about the Soviet Union, like a broken record.  ‘We have to study China, China has to be the center, and when we study the things of the world, we have to do so from a Chinese perspective. Some of our comrades have a problem, which is to always look to the outside.  They are like a record player that mechanically and uncritically talks about bringing foreign things into China.  They do not study China’s characteristics. If you do not study China’s characteristics, but only bring in things from abroad, you cannot solve China’s problems.’” 
 
“As we enter a new era, Xi Jinping has clearly signaled that ‘the solution to China's problems can only be found within China, and by exploring the path and methods that suit us.’ Xi Jinping is seeking to reshape a methodology of the Chinese path in which China is both center and method.   ‘Wholesale Sovietization in the past did not work, nor will wholesale Westernization, or any other "zation,” work now.’ Xi Jinping has always been vigilant about ‘wholesale Sovietization’ or ‘wholesale Westernization’ in history or at the present time: ‘Start from the national situation, begin and end in Chinese practice, write your texts with full consciousness of the motherland, and make innovations in theory and policy conform to Chinese reality and possess Chinese characteristics.’ Xi’s words resonate loudly:  the Chinese path must take China as both center and method.”
 
“But this is not a return to the traditional, pre-Opium War concept—including the distinction between Chinese and barbarian—of China as center and method, but rather the reshaping of Chinese agency and the Chinese spirit after more than a hundred years of loss of cultural confidence, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Neither China as center nor China as method will be a narrowly regional, traditional, old-fashioned, or nationalistic China.  Instead, it will be a more inclusive China that has survived imperialist aggression and seeks to rejuvenate, knowing that China’s development and progress cannot be separated from the world.”
 
Links to other texts on this site
 
For texts related to the theme of the CCP, click here
 
For texts related to the theme of ideology, click here
 
Translation
 
Mao Zedong's Selected Works begins with a clear statement: "A revolutionary party is the guide of the masses, and no revolution ever succeeds when the revolutionary party leads them astray.”[2] The question of the path is related to the success or failure of the cause. Our unique cultural tradition, historical destiny, and basic national conditions require that we take a development path that suits our own characteristics, namely the Chinese path.
 
In his 1989 essay “China as Method,” Japanese sinologist Mizoguchi Yūzō (1930-2010) sought to transform the methodology of Chinese studies from "world as method" to "China as method. "To take China as method is to move toward the creation of basic truths, and to the very creation of the world."[3]  Indeed, the “world” in a China studies that takes the "world as method" is not the world as it is, but the world as the West, and the West as the standard. In this world, China is merely trying to prove its legitimacy in Western terms.  Hence China lacks agency, and those "experiences" that are different from or go beyond Western truths as part of China’s own historical lineage cannot be regarded as truths to be valued.
 
As a great civilized country with thousands of years of history and hundreds of years facing the aggressive and powerful West in modern times, China has had to be neither obsequious nor supercilious, but rather composed and confident.  It has remade Chinese agency, formulating its own set of methodological paradigms, noting the specificity of both Chinese and Western truths, and converting the previously hierarchical relationship which placed Western truths above Chinese principles to a horizontal relationship of equality.   This enriches the world’s store of “truths,” thus renewing the prospect of world civilization.  This essay attempts to reshape China's agency and construct a methodology of the Chinese path based on China’s own historical development, on Chinese values and criteria, or in other words the truths and standards revealed by the Chinese path. 
 
Methodology in the Context of the History of Modern Chinese Thought
  
Xi Jinping pointed out during the 2014 National People's Congress that "the Chinese people have traditionally had a strong sense of identity and pride in their culture, but when China was reduced to colonial or semi-colonial status in modern times, our confidence in our culture and in our citizens was greatly damaged." 
 
In the confident mindset of the Chinese of the pre-Opium War period, China was both center and method. Chinese civilization created itself, formed its own system, and had an enduring history, creating a strong sense, or consciousness, of agency. This consciousness of agency is represented by Chinese civilization's concept of yi-xia 夷夏, the distinction between what is Chinese and what is uncivilized, which is not a racial but a cultural distinction.  This describes a cultural, hierarchical order that was extremely flexible; as the expression put it: "If a feudal lord uses uncivilized rituals, he is uncivilized, but if his ritual practice approaches that of the Chinese, he is Chinese 诸侯用夷礼则夷之，进于中国则中国之."[4]
 
In essence, the yi-xia concept is a civilizational theory centered on China and using China as method. This civilizational theory was both rich in Chinese agency and yet very open and inclusive, as seen in the case of Buddhism, which arrived in China the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty and imposed itself in an impressive manner, only to become, after a few centuries, the very Chinese Chan (Zen) in the Sui-Tang period (581-907),  and finally merged together with Confucianism and Daoism to become part of Neo-Confucianism, the great philosophical contribution of the Song and Ming periods.  Another example is the Western knowledge that entered China in the late Ming-early Qing period, including mathematics, astronomy, calendars, religion, science, and art, etc., the important elements of which China was able to absorb in an unhurried and autonomous way.
 
In this sense, the Opium War was indeed a watershed for "China-centeredness," because prior to this point, whether it was a case of a foreign civilization, like Buddhism, or alien regimes such as those represented by Yuan and Qing dynasties, all such things entered China as a form of conquest, yet in the process were gradually sinicized, meaning that China always remained the center. After the Opium War, however, the situation changed qualitatively, and the invaders were no longer sinicized. As the historian Joseph Levenson (1920-1969) once noted: "China could be controlled from afar, which meant that modern Europeans, unlike the Manchus, could avoid being assimilated.  Because of the backwardness of their technology, the Chinese could not bring the Europeans into their own society, nor could they drive them out."
 
China was forcibly pulled down from its position the center of the Heavenly Kingdom and gradually reduced to a "semi-colonial and semi-feudal society," becoming a vassal of the West. This was the end of cultural self-confidence and the beginning of a sense of cultural inferiority. Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (1879-1942) once pointed out: "What has changed the lives of the Chinese people and put them on the path of enlightenment is the arrival of Western civilization.  European culture is fundamentally different from the culture of our country. For hundreds of years, our country has been in turmoil, largely because of the contact and conflict between the two cultures.”  As a result, as defeat followed defeat, those seeking to understand what had happened directed their suspicious gaze toward tradition, whereupon our confident ideas like tianxia-ism (i.e., the idea of Chinese “universalism” in the premodern era) and the yi-xia concept, which had sustained us for thousands of years, fell apart.  In the face of Western civilization, with its civilized government and military mastery, what followed was a cultural sadness that endured in China for more than a hundred years.
 
In the search for truth in the late Qing period, China remained the center, but the West became the method. On the eve of the founding of the New China, Mao Zedong said: "Since the defeat of the Opium War in 1840, progressive Chinese have suffered many hardships in searching for truth in the West. Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 (1814-1864), Kang Youwei 康有为(1858-1927), Yan Fu 严复 (1854-1921) and Sun Yat-sen  孙中山 (1866-1925) represented those looking to the West for truth before the arrival of the Chinese Communist Party. During that period, Chinese people seeking progress would read any book, as long as it was a new idea from the West. The number of foreign students sent to Japan, Britain, the United States, France and Germany reached alarming levels.  After the abolition of imperial examination system, new schools sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, the idea being to learn from the West…The only way to save the country was to renew it, and the only way to renew it was to learn from foreign countries."
 
These progressive Chinese people were not seeking the truth for the sake of seeking the truth, but instead were seeking answers to China’s urgent problems. What Mao Zedong particularly emphasizes here is the temporal starting point of the search for truth from the West, which was the defeat of the Opium War in 1840, after which, the search for truth became possible. From the moment that the great powers forcibly opened China’s door in a brutal and barbaric way, salvation and survival became the theme of social movements in China for more than a hundred years, and the main task to be faced was anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism.
 
Whether it was the Foreign Affairs Movement of the 1860s and 1870s, the reform and modernization efforts of the 1890s, or the Revolution of 1911 and the founding of the Republic of China, salvation was always at the center of the movement, and the only thing that kept changing was the method. Although salvation was directed at China, the truth needed to effect the salvation began to move from China to the West, and the West gradually became the method.
 
 In his 1843 volume, Illustrated Treatise on Maritime Kingdoms 海国图志, Wei Yuan[5] 魏源 (1794-1857) begins with a straightforward statement: "Why did I write this book? To get the barbarians to attack the barbarians, to get the barbarians to pay the barbarians, and to teach the advantages of barbarian technology so that we can use them to control the barbarians." Here he breaks with the yi-xia concept, which traditionally occupied a position of absolute authority, and begins to open his eyes to the outside world, measuring the shortcomings of the dynasty from a Western perspective, thus taking a first step away from the China/barbarian order and a first step toward the international world.
 
Along with the acceleration of the learning process, the methodology of "teaching the advantages of barbarian technology so that we can use them to control the barbarians" was stretched to the limit, and a more "inclusive" slogan was needed, which gave rise to the methodology of "Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as application 中学为体，西学为用."  As Feng Guifen 冯桂芬 (1809-1874) put it, "Take the ethical principles of well-known Chinese teachings as the base, and supplement it with the techniques of wealth and power of other countries." He was the first to propose the methodology of  Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as application.

​In the Sino-Japanese War of the late 19th century, China was defeated by a very small country, leaving the country all the more humiliated. Chinese intellectuals thinking about wealth and power argued that in military matters, China should imitate the West, and that Japan’s success came from imitating the Western political system.  As a result, "Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as application" became a methodology, and a fashionable "buzzword."  Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873-1929) once said, "Zhang Zhidong 张之洞 (1837-1909) was the most enthusiastic about this methodology, which he took to be the key to revitalizing the country.” 
 
Although “Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as application” claimed to be protecting the Chinese Way, for Woren 倭仁 (1804-1871) and others who suspected that “learning from the West” was a way to “replace the Chinese with barbarians,” it was just a clever way of getting Western knowledge in the through the back door.  Under the cover of “Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as application,” the process of learning from the West moved from the external from the internal, from a means of studying natural phenomena to matters of philosophy.  In the process of expansion, the Western “application” constantly fermented within the Chinese “substance,” ultimately breaking through its original body, so that the entire notion of “Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as application” came to be stretched to the limits. 
 
In order to protect themselves and to thwart the obstruction of the stubborn conservatives, some people began to propose the more extreme slogan that "Western learning grew out of Chinese learning 西学中源."  The historian Chen Xulu 陈旭麓 (1918-1988) once commented that "’Chinese substance’ should have been a constraint on 'Western application,’ but the 'Western application' used ‘Chinese substance’ to get its foot in the door, which allowed it to have an impact according to its own needs, so that while people wanted to restrict it to a certain set of purposes, it proved to be difficult to do so. As this contradiction became increasingly evident, more enlightened people followed the logic of what was happening and pushed things even further."

​As a result, while the object of salvation was of course centered on China, truth had to be imported from the West, and the West became the method. Once the gates of the country were opened, various doctrinal trends took the stage one after the other, including capitalism, reformism, liberalism, social Darwinism, anarchism, pragmatism, populism, rural reconstruction, and labor unionism. In essence, they were all methodologies to solve China's problems, and each one excited people’s expectations, and each solution was indeed about the future and fate of China.
  
In the early years of the Republican period, we see a competition between Westernization and Sovietization.  The difference between the reformists and the revolutionaries was merely that the reformists brought in the new without getting rid of the old, while the revolutionaries both brought in the new and got rid of the old. The establishment of the Republic of China put an end to thousands of years of imperial rule. However, the Republic of China was not the panacea people expected at the time, and quickly gave way to a period of turmoil, chaos, and unrest. Sun Yat-sen once lamented: "The Republic has been in existence for six years, but the people have never enjoyed its blessings."
 
In fact, the Republic of China was “republican” in name only.  The end of the imperial power left a vacuum of authority, and no party was able to control the situation and restore order in the short term. In the face of this chaos, two influential intellectual trends emerged.   One of these was cultural conservatism, represented by Liang Qichao and Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893-1988). Liang Shuming declared that "the future of world culture is the revival of Chinese culture.” The other was the trend of extreme Westernization trend, represented by Hu Shih 胡适 (1891-1962) and Chen Xujing 陈序经 (1903-1967). 
 
According to Hu Shih, "At this time there is no other option; our only choice is to fully import the new civilization of this new world." Chen Xujing was an even firmer supporter of the theory of total Westernization: "To save China from its present danger, we must fully Westernize." As a Chinese intellectual, to arrive at the point of advocating total Westernization necessarily fills one with sadness.  After all, taking such a step thoroughly eclipses Chinese spiritual agency, as the West has become both method and center.  After such an overcorrection, the road to rebuild Chinese cultural confidence has been long.
 
While the "total Westernization theory" was in full swing, the "total Sovietization theory" also emerged in the CCP, a view which saw the Soviet Union as both center and method.  This was the same as Westernization except that the Soviet Union took the place of the West, which is the dogmatism that Mao Zedong later strongly criticized: "China had two dogmas, the old one and the foreign one, both of which were forms of ideological enslavement. The May Fourth Movement broke the enslavement of the old dogma and was a major enlightenment movement. After the defeat of the 1911 Revolution, our Party was guilty of foreign dogmatism, and now we are carrying out a rectification campaign against subjectivism, sectarianism, and Party formalism.  This is an equally important enlightenment movement, because many cadres have been deeply poisoned by this dogma, and need to do enlightenment work.” 
 
The "foreign dogmas" referred to here include the "total Westernization" and the "total Sovietization," the latter of which was certainly more serious for the CCP and was a matter of life and death for the Party.  The example of the "Sino-Soviet Conflict中东路事件" can give us a glimpse of the serious "total Sovietization" in the Party at that time.
 
The "Sino-Soviet conflict" refers to a conflict between China and the Soviet Union in 1929 over the Chinese recovery of Soviet railroad privileges in northeast China.[6] After Chen Duxiu was dismissed from his post as General Secretary of the CCP, the dogmatists who had studied in the Soviet Union held the real power in the Party and were subservient to the Communist International, which was controlled by the CPSU (Bolsheviks).  This was especially true after Stalin took power, when his nationalist position of defending Soviet interests made this situation completely obvious.
 
In the course of the conflict, the Kuomintang called for the defense of China’s "national interests" and strove to recover the rights of East China Road from the Soviet Union, and while there was some trickery involved on the KMT side, it is true that the majority of the Chinese people were not enlightened enough to view the Soviet Union from the internationalist proletarian standpoint, and instead took the nationalist position that the Soviet Union was encroaching on Chinese territory. The dogmatist returned Russian students within the Chinese Communist Party, however, ignored the facts and openly declared that "arming to protect the Soviet Union is our central slogan for mobilizing the masses.” 
 
All of this made Chen Duxiu anxious: "Our propaganda methods seem not to have achieved the simplicity as those of brother parties in other countries.  In other words, we only blather on about vast theories of world revolution, and cannot answer the practical questions that need to be answered in the minds of the masses…Monotonous propaganda abstracted from concrete issues can only be understood by the most enlightened elements.  It is incapable of mobilizing the masses, and leads the masses to misunderstand us as playing merely the role of the ‘ruble,’ without regard for national interests; and makes it easy for the Kuomintang to pit their 'pro-China' slogans against our 'pro-Soviet Russia' slogans, letting the masses choose one for themselves."
 
Chen Duxiu's fears were not empty, as can be seen in Liang Qichao's letter to his children: "The Communist Party, under the command of the Third International, has only one goal, which is to sacrifice China as the first step toward world revolution." In response to Chen Duxiu's letter, the top brass of the CCP continued to insist on the centrality of the Soviet Union and gave Chen Duxiu a stern rebuke, stating clearly that even if the masses were backward in their consciousness, the Party could not "pitch our slogans lower and chase after the backward consciousness of the masses," and that "to support the Chinese revolution is to support the Soviet Union, and to support the Soviet Union is to support the Chinese revolution."
 
Mao Zedong later made a profound summary of the "total Sovietization theory" that "took the Soviet Union as both center and method:" "It took several decades for us to understand China. How will it do for Chinese people to not understand the Chinese situation? The real understanding of independence began with the Zunyi Conference 遵义会议[7] of 1935, which criticized dogmatism. The dogmatists said that the Soviets got everything right in the Soviet Union and did not integrate the Soviet experience with Chinese reality." Thus, similar to "total Westernization," the "total Sovietization" of the Soviet dogmatists was another version of foreign dogma, which merely replaced the West with the Soviet Union.
 
Yan’an’s Quest: China as Center and Method
 
On the eve of the founding of the New China, Mao Zedong made a profound summary of the historical process of China’s learning from the West in modern times: "From the Opium War in 1840 to the eve of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, a total of more than seventy years, the Chinese had no ideological weapons with which to resist imperialism. The stubborn old feudal ideological weapons had lost on the battlefield, were incapable of resisting the West, and were declared bankrupt. As a last resort, the Chinese people were forced to learn ideological weapons and political programs such as theories of progress, evolution, human rights, and bourgeois republicanism from the arsenal of the era of the bourgeois-capitalist revolution in the West, the breeding ground of imperialism, and organized political parties and revolutions, thinking that they could defend themselves against outside foreign powers and build a republic within. But these weapons turned out to be just as weak as the ideological weapons of feudalism, and once again, unable to resist the West, they were defeated and declared bankrupt."
 
Indeed, in modern times, advanced Chinese looked to the West for truth, and found many solutions, including even the most advanced bourgeois republican system, which they tried, but it did not change the tragic fate of the Chinese people who were enslaved and oppressed. It was not until the outbreak of the October Revolution in 1917 that Marxism-Leninism became known to the Chinese people for the first time, at which point China changed its direction.
 
The young Mao Zedong took China as center and Russia as method. In his youth, although Mao Zedong was a staunch supporter and organizer of the work-study movement in France, he insisted on staying in China after sending off his dear friends, for which he once gave this explanation: "I think we need someone to go to foreign countries, to see something new, to learn something new, to study something useful, and to bring it back to transform our country. At the same time, we also need people to stay in our own country and study our own problems. I feel that I know too little about my own country, and it would be more beneficial to my country if I spent my time here."
 
Mao Zedong did not share the general cultural inferiority complex of Chinese students, nor their eagerness to study abroad to save the country. In his letter to his classmate Zhou Shizhao 周世钊 (1897-1976), he looked at the Chinese problem from the height of the history of world civilization and showed his far-sightedness: "World civilization is divided into two streams, the Eastern and the Western, and Eastern civilization has to occupy a half of world civilization. However, Eastern civilization can be said to be Chinese civilization. It seems that we should first study the major points of our ancient and modern theories and systems before studying in the West, which will enable us to make apt comparisons." "If we want to make a contribution to the current world situation, then we cannot leave China out.  As to China’s situation, we need to investigate and study things here. If we put this off, waiting for those studying abroad to return home, it seems to me that this will be difficult for personal and practical reasons.  It is better to do it now, first, because we will avoid some of the problems just discussed; and second, we can take some of our experience to the West, to be used as a comparison in our studies."
 
In Mao Zedong's view, even if you want to study abroad, saving the country must nonetheless focus on China as center, and the exercise requires solid, in-depth understanding of national conditions, the fruit of good research done in China. The young Mao Zedong, who was greatly influenced by Russia’s October Revolution, expressed his eagerness to find a new path in a letter to a close friend: "In the past few months I have finally understood.  The political world has become so corrupt that there is no hope for political improvement. We have no choice but to ignore everything and find another way to create a new environment."
 
He gradually discovered that this alternative path was the new path of the Russian class revolution. In his speech at the Changsha Congress of the New People's Association in January 1921, he pointed out that there were five ways to solve social problems in the world today: first, social policy; second, social democracy; third, radical communism (Lenin's doctrine); fourth, moderate communism (Bertrand Russell's doctrine); and fifth, anarchism. Regarding these five, he strongly disagreed with the reformist method, and favored following the Russian example and advocating large-scale revolution:

​"In terms of method, I highly approve of using the Russian style to bring about democracy, because it is a newly invented method that succeeds where all else has failed, and if only for this contains more possibilities than other methods of transformation…Radical communism, also known as labor-peasantism 劳农主义, uses the method of class dictatorship, and we know the results it produces, so this is what we should use." Indeed, the Bolshevik October Revolution set an example, and it was the inevitable choice of the times to follow the Russian path.
 
Mao Zedong strove to break through the theoretical framework in which “Soviet Russia as method” determined both content and form, and to rebuild something where "China would be both center and method."  Having survived a baptism of fire during the revolutionary war, and having suffered the dogmatists’ attacks, he arrived at the small northwestern city of Yan'an after the drama of Long March with a well thought-out plan, and began to think systematically about the methodology of China’s path. 
 
Especially in response to the "total Sovietization theory," proposed by the returned Russian students, which took the Soviet experience as center and method, Mao Zedong first argued that the Chinese revolution must be centered on China. Mao Zedong gave a strong rebuttal to the popular view that the comrades of the Communist International who were in charge of the direction of the China question knew China better than the Chinese: "From an overall perspective, China’s objective world is understood by the Chinese people, and not by the comrades of the Communist International who are in charge of the China question. These comrades of the Comintern do not know or understand—or do not know or understand well—Chinese society, the Chinese nation and the Chinese revolution. It took us a long to arrive at a clear understanding of China’s objective world, which means that the task much be all the more difficult for foreign comrades.” 
 
To grasp Chinese problems and to understand revolutionary practice, Mao always insisted on the agency of Chinese people, "The victory of the Chinese revolutionary struggle depends on our Chinese comrades' understanding of the Chinese situation." After a long revolutionary struggle, Mao Zedong was convinced of this. "Over the course of his life, Marx was unable to foresee and solve all the problems that would emerge in the future. Russia’s problems could only be solved by Lenin, and China’s problems can only be solved by the Chinese people."

​During the Yan'an rectification period, Mao abhorred the dogmatists who ignored Chinese questions and could only talk about the Soviet Union, like a broken record.  "We have to study China, China has to be the center, and when we study the things of the world, we have to do so from a Chinese perspective. Some of our comrades have a problem, which is to always look to the outside.  They are like a record player that mechanically and uncritically talks about bringing foreign things into China.  They do not study China’s characteristics. If you do not study China’s characteristics, but only bring in things from abroad, you cannot solve China’s problems." 
 
On this basis, Mao Zedong argued that putting China front and center should be established as a major Party principle and become a guideline for the entire Party to follow. "We must establish the policy of taking the study of the actual problems of the Chinese revolution as the center, and using the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism as our guide." In fact, the familiar phrase "make the ancient serve the present and the foreign serve the Chinese 古为今用，洋为中用" is a clear expression of Mao's China-centered approach. Employing this method, and through the persistent and painstaking practice of revolutionary struggle, Mao Zedong created a number of Chinese theories with the theory of New Democracy as the general outline (and also including the theories of the villages encircling the cities, armed struggle, the United Front, etc.).
 
Mao Zedong held firm to the idea of China as center, but he had a harder time with the idea of China as method.  From the moment of the very creation of our Party, the influence of the Soviet Union and the Communist International has been huge in terms both of theory and practice, especially the theories of Lenin and Stalin regarding the national liberation struggle of colonial and semi-colonial countries. In the context of the national liberation of the Eastern countries, Stalin’s demand was: "In terms of content, it will be proletarian; in terms of form, it will be national—this is the universal culture towards which socialism is moving. The culture of the proletariat does not erase national culture, but rather gives it content. By the same token, national culture, does not erase the culture of the proletariat, but gives it form."
 
During the Yan'an period, in the process of systematically thinking about the sinicization of Marxism, Mao Zedong was deeply influenced by this, which is prominently expressed in the theory of New Democracy: "Chinese culture should have its own form, which is the national form. The form is the nation, the content is New Democracy—this is today’s new culture."[8] Basing himself on China’s specific national conditions, Mao simply replaced the content of the proletariat with the content of New Democracy. But this was not all, and Mao still felt quite distant from this simple and mechanical "content plus form" understanding of the sinicization of Marxism. 
 
In the article "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War," which was included in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong after the founding of New China, we find the following familiar passage: " Another of our tasks is to study our historical heritage and use the Marxist method to sum it up critically. Our national history goes back several thousand years and has its own characteristics and innumerable treasures. But in these matters we are mere schoolboys. Contemporary China has grown out of the China of the past; we are Marxists in our historical approach and must not lop off our history. We should sum up our history from Confucius to Sun Yat-sen and take over this valuable legacy. This is important for guiding the great movement of today."[9]
 
There were two major changes to the text when it was published in Selected Works.  The first is that after " our national history goes back several thousand years " there was originally another phrase: "with its own laws of development and its own national characteristics."  The second is that " We should sum up our history from Confucius to Sun Yat-sen and take over this valuable legacy" was originally followed by another phrase "take over this valuable legacy and transform it into a method.” 
 
When the Selected Works of Mao Zedong was compiled after the founding of New China, this statement was deleted as a matter of course, probably in consideration of the situation at the time regarding learning from the Soviet Union. But what was deleted from the original text is crucial, because it reflects Mao's thinking on China as method. The Chinese nation "has its own laws of development,» and it is extremely important to inherit this cultural heritage "and turn it into a method," illustrating that the long-standing Chinese civilization is not just a national form, but that it is about the nation's own laws of historical development, and these laws themselves make up an important part of the content of socialism. 
 
In his conversation with the journalist Günther Stein, Mao said: "Without the Chinese people, there would be no Chinese Communist Party…There are many good things in the legacy Chinese history has handed down to us. We must make these legacies our own." In the practice of brutal struggle, Mao Zedong deeply understood the great significance of national characteristics to the Chinese revolution:  "A country always has its own characteristics, and things that do not fit with these characteristics will not work."
 
That said, from the Yan'an period until Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong tried not to mention slogans such as "sinicization" because of the relationship between the two parties and the two countries, and especially because of Stalin’s authority. For a time, he even stopped mentioning "Mao Zedong Thought."
 
But Mao was ultimately not satisfied with the simple "content plus form" understanding of the sinicization of Marxism and remained determined to make a theoretical breakthrough. In particular, when talking with the head of the Chinese Musicians' Association in 1956, Mao Zedong clearly pointed out that it was necessary to learn from the ancients and foreigners, but also to oppose conservatism and dogmatism, and to learn the good things from both sides, and turning two "half bottles of vinegar" into two "full bottles of vinegar." "This has nothing to do with 'Chinese learning as substance, Western learning as application.’ 'Learning' refers to basic theory, which is the same in China and abroad, and should not be divided into Chinese and Western."
 
The meaning of this is only too obvious:  that like Western theory (even Marxism), Chinese "learning" also contains many things that are no less valuable than Western theory.  Chinese learning is one of many “contents” and is not just a matter of form. "To say that the Chinese national heritage has no laws is to negate this heritage, which is not right…Chinese things have their own laws." Mao Zedong further pointed out, "Foreign things should be absorbed in function of the Chinese foundation.  The two should match up in an organic integration…When we absorb foreign things, we change them and make them Chinese…We must pay attention to the national heritage, and not Westernize everything…It will only make sense in this way and we will not lose our national confidence." Finally, Mao Zedong humorously pointed out that sinicization must "create something new and unique to China", such as a new species resulting from mating donkeys and horses, for example, a "mule" that is neither a donkey nor a horse.
 
Hu Qiaomu 胡乔木 (19122-1992) once shrewdly pointed out that "Chinese culture played a great role in the Chinese revolution. Why was China able to embrace Marxism?...What are the characteristics of the integration of Chinese history and culture with Marxism? On what issues exactly has integration occurred? This needs to be studied."
 
In fact, in “On Contradiction,” Mao Zedong had already clearly pointed out the relevant Chinese law: " The October Socialist Revolution ushered in a new epoch in world history as well as in Russian history.  It exerted influence on internal changes in the other countries in the world and, similarly and in a particularly profound way, on internal changes in China. These changes, however, were effected through the inner laws of development of these countries, China included."[10] And in "On New Democracy," Mao further pointed out that nationality is not only a form, but also a content: the culture of New Democracy "belongs to our own nation and bears our own national characteristics. It links up with the socialist and new-democratic cultures of all other nations and they are related in such a way that they can absorb something from each other and help each other to develop, together forming a new world culture."[11]
 
As content, Chinese civilization combines with the advanced cultures of other nations to form a new world culture. Mao had already made a distinction between national characteristics and national forms: "The universal truth of Marxism and the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution must be completely and properly united, that is to say, combined with national characteristics and through a certain national form, before it can be useful, and it must not be applied subjectively or formulaically." In this respect, the philosopher Feng Qi 冯契 (1915-1996) offered a profound explanation: "What we call regional characteristics or national style is never solely a matter of form. When we talk about Chinese style, we often only mention national form. In fact, form and content must not be separated into two parts, and style exists in the unity of content and form." Therefore, only Chinese civilization in which both form and content are manifested at the same time is truly powerful and vital. 
 
After the founding of New China, Mao Zedong consistently sought a way to break through the simple "content plus form" formula concerning the sinicization of the Marxist path in China, becoming all the more conscious of the urgency of the task after Khrushchev's thorough-going criticism of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. "Now, thanks to Khrushchev's lifting of the lid, we should consider all aspects of the question of how to act in accordance with the Chinese situation.  There is no need to be as superstitious as we were in the past.  In fact, we were not completely superstitious in the past and made our own original breakthroughs. Now it is all the more important to try to find the specific path to build socialism in China." One might say that Mao’s mission as a Chinese Marxist involved a lifelong and continuous effort to find a methodology for the Chinese path.
 
Reinventing the New Era: China as Center and Method
 
As we enter a new era, Xi Jinping has clearly signaled that "the solution to China's problems can only be found within China, and by exploring the path and methods that suit us." Xi Jinping is seeking to reshape a methodology of the Chinese path in which China is both center and method.   "Wholesale Sovietization in the past did not work, nor will wholesale Westernization, or any other ‘-zation,’ work now." Xi Jinping has always been vigilant about "wholesale Sovietization" or "wholesale Westernization" in history or at the present time: "Start from the national situation, begin and end in Chinese practice, write your texts with full consciousness of the motherland, and make innovations in theory and policy conform to Chinese reality and possess Chinese characteristics." Xi’s words resonate loudly:  the Chinese path must take China as both center and method.
 
The approach to China's problems must take China as both center and message.  Xi Jinping has emphasized, "The kind of ‘ism’ a country practices depends crucially on whether that ‘ism’ can solve the historic problems facing the country." In modern times, the extremely impoverished and weak Chinese nation has been at the mercy of others, and progressive intellectuals tried various isms, including reformism, liberalism, social Darwinism, anarchism, pragmatism, and labor unionism, one after the other, but none of them solved China's problems. "Everything else has been tried and has failed. Some of those who favored these approaches else have lost their positions, some have come to their senses, and some are currently changing their minds."
 
The Chinese people finally chose Marxism, realized their long-cherished dream of revolutionary nation-building, and fundamentally reversed the fate of the Chinese nation. Therefore, even Marxism was chosen by the Chinese people for the purpose of comprehensively solving China's problems, and it cannot be abstracted or dogmatized. "Adherence to Marxism, to socialism, must have a developmental perspective, must be centered on the actual problems of China's reform and opening,  on modernization, on what we are doing."
 
Each country and nation has different historical traditions, cultural accumulations, and basic national conditions, and their development paths are bound to have their own characteristics. If we unthinkingly take foreign academic ideas and methods as norms, and if everything is Western-centered and governed by Western standards, we cannot have agency and originality. To continuously promote the sinicization of Marxism, it is necessary to start from China, to know truth through practice, and test and develop such truth. 
 
Xi Jinping has stressed, "Do not forget our ancestors…to solve China's problems, to put forward Chinese solutions to human problems, requires adhering to a Chinese worldview and methodology." If you only respect and follow Western things, if you enthusiastically embrace de-sinicization, once your noble head is lowered, then even the most powerful body cannot stand.  In the end this will certainly lead the Chinese nation astray, and into danger! 
 
Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized the need to firmly establish cultural confidence and adhere to the Chinese cultural position. "If we have no spiritual independence of our own, this pulls the carpet out from under out our political, ideological, cultural and institutional independence.”  Therefore, we must come to a profound understanding of Xi Jinping's strategic intention of promoting cultural self-confidence from the ideological height of maintaining our national spiritual agency.
 
The report of the 19th Party Congress in 2017 clearly emphasizes that we must "adhere to a Chinese cultural standpoint grounded in contemporary Chinese reality." Chinese civilization is the cultural fertile ground in which socialism with Chinese characteristics is rooted, and it is the deepest cultural soft power of the Chinese nation. The Chinese have created China’s enduring culture, and will certainly be able to push this culture to new heights. 
 
Marx pointed out, " Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."[12] With the arrival of the new era, Xi Jinping has treated Chinese civilization with integrity and sincerity, seeking to correct wrong attitudes toward Chinese culture. Influenced by the radical anti-traditionalism of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, some extreme views painted traditional culture as a product of the agrarian era and part of a feudal culture. Mao Zedong once pointed out that "China's culture of several thousand years is mainly the culture of the feudal era, but not all of it is feudal, there are grass-roots elements, there are anti-feudal elements. It is necessary to distinguish feudal elements from non-feudal elements. Not all feudal things are bad."
 
If even feudalism cannot be wholly negated, how much more is this true for the spiritual lifeblood of Chinese civilization that has lasted for thousands of years. A culture is not born out of nowhere, but must be nurtured within a certain maternal body.  Chinese civilization, with Confucianism as its mainstream, was born in the body of Chinese agricultural civilization, and has experienced ups and downs for thousands of years while continuing to thrive. Xi Jinping has pointed out that "our agricultural civilization stretches back to the depths of time, and is the root of our excellent Chinese traditional culture." 
 
Ever since the Yan'an period, Mao Zedong was dissatisfied with the "content plus form" theoretical framework for the sinicization of Marxism and tried to make a breakthrough, but there were too many obstacles.  "After Marxism was introduced to China, it was no accident that the ideas of scientific socialism were warmly welcomed by the Chinese people and eventually took root and blossomed in China, but they were integrated with the excellent history and culture inherited for thousands of years in China and the values that the people unconsciously practice every day."
 
In the new era, Xi Jinping has continued this tradition and has continued to explore, taking the lead in breaking new theoretical ground, trying to go beyond the theoretical model of "content plus form," and pointing out that Chinese civilization is not only our national form, but is also the very content itself, thus putting forward the "cultural gene theory,"  demonstrating the deep integration of Marxism with Chinese history and Chinese culture. 
 
In December 2013, Xi Jinping pointed out during the collective study of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee that "in the course of the 5,000 years of the development of our civilization, the Chinese people have created a splendid and profound culture, and we need to make the most basic cultural genes of the Chinese people adapt to contemporary culture and harmonize with modern society, presenting them in such a way that people can enjoy and participate, promoting a cultural spirit that transcends time and space, transcends national boundaries, radiating eternal charisma and contemporary value."
 
Subsequently, Xi Jinping repeatedly mentioned that "Chinese traditional culture is broad and deep…and its core elements have become the most basic cultural genes of the Chinese nation." "We must adhere to the Chinese cultural stance and inherit the Chinese cultural genes." In his speech on September 22, 2020, Xi Jinping particularly stressed that "we should seriously study the origins and qualities of Chinese civilization and Chinese culture, and form a more complete conceptual system of China’s cultural genes." In Xi Jinping's view, the basic values and spiritual doctrines embedded in Chinese civilization, which transcend time and space, transcend national boundaries, are rich in eternal charm and have contemporary value, have become flesh, blood, and water, fusing with the Chinese people, and have eternal value in the past and in the present.
 
The purpose of Xi Jinping's "cultural gene" theory is to emphasize the great importance that he attaches to the relationship between Marxism and Chinese civilization, which is related to the question of the methodology employed in the theoretical construction of the sinicization of Marxism. Marxism's sinicization is not a simple theoretical structure of "content plus form," with Marxism as the content and Chinese civilization as the form, in which Marxism "transforms" China and China "transforms" Marxism. 
 
On the one hand, Marxism, by serving as a guide to practice, has greatly changed Chinese society and transformed and upgraded Chinese civilization.  On the other hand, the application of Marxism to China required attention to China’s own national conditions, and Chinese civilization itself has its own "universal" value principles and national characteristics, i.e., the cultural genes of the Chinese nation, which have the significance in terms of China as method.  The combination of the two arrives at a new type of theoretical construct containing both Marxist guidance and the Chinese cultural standpoint.
 
In this regard, the role of Chinese civilization in the sinicization of Marxism is not just as national form which serves the Marxist content, it is itself an innate cultural gene, and as long as Chinese people apply Marxism on Chinese territory, they are bound to inherit this cultural gene, which itself constitutes a basic content, which combines with Marxism, another content, creating a new theory suitable to China’s national characteristics. "Marxism’s entry into China not only triggered profound changes in Chinese civilization, but Marxism itself also went through a process of gradual sinicization." Otherwise, the sinicization of Marxism would not possess its vigorous and exuberant vitality.
 
As Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893-1988) said in his later years, "China's history of the last hundred years proves that complete Westernization' is not in line with China's national conditions, and its essence was to dismiss the fact that the characteristics of traditional Chinese culture have acted on the Chinese people yesterday and today, so naturally, ‘complete Westernization’ cannot work. Even the construction of socialism has to respect 'Chinese characteristics' in order to take root and blossom in China, a wise proposition much in line with traditional Chinese culture."
 
Xi Jinping's cultural gene theory transcends the relationship between Marxism as content and Chinese civilization as form, and truly realizes the deep integration of Marxism and Chinese civilization, a marriage of two forms of content. Thus, Marxism and Chinese civilization are dialectically intertwined, constructing a new theoretical form for the sinicization of Marxism in the new era, and making an original contribution to the advancement of the sinicization of Marxism.
 
"Only by not forgetting history have we opened up the future, and only by accepting our heritage have we excelled at innovation. Only by keeping history in mind while moving toward the future, and only by preserving the people’s culture while charting future progress have we been able to undertake today’s great cause." From the day it was founded, the Communist Party of China has been both an active leader and practitioner of China's advanced culture and a faithful inheritor and promoter of China's excellent traditional culture.
 
During the Yan'an period, Mao Zedong emphasized that the Chinese Communists were Marxist historicists and attached importance to inheriting the cultural heritage from Confucius to Sun Yat-sen, which can be said to be our Party’s first cultural self-awareness. However, due to the domestic and international situation at that time and after the establishment of New China, the work of inheriting the cultural heritage was not carried out sufficiently and thoroughly. With the arrival of reform and opening, although the emphasis was on both material civilization and spiritual civilization, the central task conferred on us by history was nonetheless economic construction.
 
Hu Qiaomu once pointed out: "In the Yan’an period, Comrade Mao Zedong proposed to study China's history and culture in a systematic manner, but it was not done. We cannot blame our predecessors, because the proper conditions did not exist at the time.  After liberation, although the conditions existed, it is sad to say that the efforts we should have undertaken were done poorly. There was no great concentration of effort focused in-depth exploration, so this task is for the present and the future, and there is still a long way to go."
 
Entering the new era, Xi Jinping stood at the strategic height of the revival of Chinese civilization and put forward his important argument concerning cultural confidence, calmly displaying the historical and cultural outlook of a great Party, a great country, and a great nation. "Culture is the soul of a country and a people. History and the present both illustrate that a nation that abandons or betrays its history and culture cannot develop, but is likely to live a historical tragedy. Cultural self-confidence is a more basic, broader and deeper self-confidence, a more fundamental, deeper and more lasting strength."  Thus, re-examining Chinese civilization as a cultural gene and focusing on the cultural role of a great Party and a great country have become the cultural mission conferred on the Chinese Communists by history and the present era.
 
Of course, what must be made clear here that an approach that takes China as both center and method is not blindly self-confident, something that will lead us once again close to close our doors and isolate China from the world. The new century, and especially the past few years, has seen an undercurrent of counter-globalization, but China will not close its doors, and instead will only open them wider and wider! Whether in terms of China’s ancient civilization or the advanced West, today's China is able to maintain the rationality and the calm confidence of a great nation.
 
Looking back at the intellectual development of China over the past hundred years, it is true that China's old ideological weapons were clearly obsolete, and China clearly lagged behind world trends after the Industrial Revolution. Although all the movements to emulate the West since the Opium War have taken the West as method, even producing extreme trends such as complete Westernization and complete Sovietization, this was the inevitable path by which a late-developing country catches up. Some scholars call this Western-centered attitude a "defensive mentality."
 
The wanton aggression of the imperialist West in modern times has indeed brought much suffering to the Chinese nation. However, as the representative of advanced productive forces following the Industrial Revolution, the West has also opened China’s eyes, and the introduction of Western advanced techniques has also allowed China to catch up rapidly. In particular, Marxism, which emerged in the West and was strongly critical of Western capitalism, was studied and mastered by the Chinese, enabling them to renew themselves by changing their spirit from passive to active.  Through the continuous efforts of progressive Chinese in recent times, especially the Chinese Communist Party and the continuous efforts and exploration from Mao Zedong down to Xi Jinping, and through the synthesis of the Hegelian dialectic, they have tried to return to an approach where China will be both center and method. 
 
But this is not a return to the traditional, pre-Opium War concept—including the distinction between Chinese and barbarian—of China as center and method, but rather the reshaping of Chinese agency and the Chinese spirit after more than a hundred years of loss of cultural confidence, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Neither China as center nor China as method will be a narrowly regional, traditional, old-fashioned, or nationalistic China.  Instead, it will be a more inclusive China that has survived imperialist aggression and seeks to rejuvenate, knowing that China’s development and progress cannot be separated from the world.
 
This China can neither blindly restore its past to rest in ignorance and the rejection of others, and recognizes the necessity of learning form others even while focusing on the national subject.  “Guided by Marxism, and faithful to the standpoint of Chinese culture,” we will apply lessons from the past and from abroad to China’s needs, not forgetting our roots but absorbing things from the outside, looking ever toward the future.  China's path is not created out of nothing, nor is it like the Monkey King who suddenly evolved out of a stone.[13]  Instead, we need to reposition this path in the historical perspective of the ancient and modern civilizations of China and the West, subject it to objective and rational self-examination, so that the understanding of China's path becomes more rich and profound, the future development of China's path more confident!
 
As one scholar said, "I don't think our path is one that only China can follow, because a path that China can truly follow, must be a path that is acceptable to human beings throughout the world, and the path we are following now should be a path that all humanity may need in the future." With China as center and China as method, this is the civilizational self-awareness and cultural self-confidence of the Chinese nation after a century of cultural sorrow, and moreover, it is the reshaping and return of the spirit of Chinese agency, which is methodologically meaningful in our consideration of the Chinese path, and also seeks to step towards the creation of truth and the renewal of human civilization.

Notes

[1] 张城, “中国道路的方法论——以中国为中心，以中国为方法,” published in Open Times 开放时代 in the 2021.2 print edition, and online on March 15, 2021.

[2] Translator’s note:  See https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/sw-in-pdf/sw-flp-1965-v1.pdf, p. 21.

[3] Translator’s note:  Mizoguchi presumably drew inspiration from Takeuchi Yoshimi’s (1910-1977) 1960 lecture on “Asia as Method,” and both authors presumably inspired Chen Kuan-Hsing’s (b. 1957) Asia as Method:  Toward Deimperialization (2010).  A review of Chen’s book is available here.

[4] Translator’s note:  The quote comes from the Tang Confucian Han Yu’s 韓愈 (768-824) text entitled “The Origin of the Way 原道,” and is apparently an indirect quote from Confucius in the Zuozhuan.

[5] Translator’s note:  Wei Yuan, like all of the figures in the subsequent paragraphs, was an important participant in the Chinese debates over “Western knowledge” that began in the wake of the first Opium War, and to some extent have continued to this day, as this very essay attests.  Strangely enough, almost all the figures Zhang mentions appear in the classic 1954 volume China’s Response to the West, by Teng-Ssu Yu and John K. Fairbank, which translates texts they saw as central documents in the debate.  Of course, Zhang Cheng may have referred to the Teng and Fairbank volume, one more proof of the immense weight of Western knowledge in the Chinese intellectual world.

[6] Translator’s note:  The Chinese Eastern Railway was constructed by the Russian empire between 1897 and 1902, in a period when China had been much weakened by her loss in the Sino-Japanese War, as well as by Western reaction to the Boxer Uprising in the early twentieth century.  Soviet authorities originally promised to return the railroad to Chinese control, with no demand for compensation, but subsequently changed their mind, and made side deals with the warlord Zhang Xueliang 张学良 (1901-2001) to maintain de facto joint control.  In 1929, the Kuomintang regime sought to retake Chinese control of the railroad, but the Soviets pushed back, eventually mobilizing the Red Army in one of the first large-scale—and successful—uses of military force since the establishment of the Soviet Union.

[7] Translator’s note:  In the conventional historiography of the CCP, the Zhunyi Conference marked the moment when Mao began to establish his authority within the Party.

[8] Translator’s note:  See https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/sw-in-pdf/sw-flp-1965-v2.pdf, p. 381.

[9] Translator’s note:  See https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_10.htm

[10] Translator’s note:  See https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/sw-in-pdf/sw-flp-1965-v1.pdf, p. 314.

[11] Translator’s note:  See https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/sw-in-pdf/sw-flp-1965-v2.pdf, p. 380.

[12] Translator’s note:  See https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

[13] Translator’s note:  The Monkey King 孙悟空, who was born from a stone egg formed from an ancient rock created by the coupling of heaven and earth, is a major figure in the 16th century novel Journey to the West 西游记.