Paradoxical Routes of the Sinification of Marxism: Materialist Dialectic and Immanent Critique

This chapter explores the representative historical discourses related to the sinification of Marxism and examines how and why the discourse and the institutional practices of the sinification of Marxism moved toward the perverse turn. It discusses the process of realization and even institutionalization of the objectified and reified Marxist ideas. The pathological and paradoxical route of the sinification of Marxism, in its attempt to reject the colonial domination from the West and to develop Marxism with Chinese characteristics, in the spirit of economic development, has reached its pinnacle point. The sinification of Marxism was in the beginning an act of living labor by many Chinese intellectuals in accordance with contemporary circumstances in order to engage with the present of the historical moment. The movement of Examining Legalist Theories and Censuring Confucianism that mobilized sustained philosophical debates on the Struggle between Confucianism and Legalism in 1973-1974 was an exemplary incident of the pathological development of the sinification of Marxism.