Ukrainian Policymaker (Jun 2022)
Modernization of Marxism in Modern China: Alternative Philosophical and Social Studies Interpretations
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, theoreticalmethodological and ideological reforming of Marxism in China are determined. An innovative methodological approach to the study of Marxism has been proposed to Ukrainian and foreign professional communities of philosophers and political scientists of politics. Based on a comparative analysis of the classical postulates of Marxist doctrine and its particular interpretation in China, the specific features of paradigmatic Chinese and Chinese Marxism are characterized; by the meanings, goals and objectives of those projects for their modernization that are currently being developed in the People’s Republic of China are revealed. The use of the obtained results contributes to the efficiency of further research into the history of development and the specifics of the interpretation of Marxist ideas in China; optimizes the theoretical platform, and expands the methodological and conceptual tools for the scientific, de-ideological reconstruction of the processes of modernization of Marxist doctrine in this country at the beginning of the 21st century; provides an adequate understanding of its structural and functional features, as well as possible prospects and limits of reform.
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