Perspectives on Marxism in China Today: An Interview with Su Shaozhi

Abstract

The Cultural Revolution in China from the mid-1960s through the 1970s greatly impaired the study and development of Marxist thought in the most populous country in the world. Ironically, the avowed purpose of the upheaval had been to defend Marxism-Leninism from revisionism, but it was not until the latter part of the 1970s that the leaders of the Communist Party of China recognized that Chinese Marxism was in danger of becoming ossified and irrelevant to many in the country. Marxism as a theoretical system had stagnated because it had not developed through confronting and solving the ongoing problems of socialist construction in China, let alone addressing the developments in Marxist thought in the advanced capitalist countries. Marxism, like the rest of China, had gotten stuck in the dogmatism and formalism of the later years of the Cultural Revolution.

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