Readings in Chinese Communist Ideology

By Wen-Shun Chi

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520323896

Book preview

READINGS IN CHINESE COMMUNIST IDEOLOGY

READINGS IN

Chinese Communist Ideology

A Manual for Students of the Chinese Language WEN-SHUN CHI

1968

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California Cambridge University Press London, England Copyright ® 1968, by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-11201 Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

This is a sequel to my Readings in Chinese Communist Documents. Both

books seek to help American students of Chinese and especially of

Chinese Communism in developing a command of the Chinese language

adequate for firsthand understanding of Chinese Communist materials as a basis for research in their own fields of special interest. The present book, however, differs from the first in two principal ways:

(a) In the first book, the material was presented chronologically and related to the major events of the first ten years of Communist rule (1949-1959). Here the material, by arrangement and selection, is intended to exemplify the major expressions of Chinese Communist ideology in various important aspects: politics, economics, philosophy, law and so forth.

(b) The first book was limited to the first decade of Communist rule. This new book deals with the development of Chinese Communist ideology, beginning with 1930 during the period of the Kiangsi Soviet and going up to the philosophical polemic still continuing on the mainland.

Lesson I is an attempt, by carefully selected excerpts and texts, to give a comprehensive summary of the basic thought of Mao Tse-tung. This lesson, consisting of 12 selections, is much longer than the other lessons; Mao’s ideology is accorded more attention and space in view of his dominant role in China today. The material in the other lessons relates to: the nature of the Chinese Communist Party, its relationship to international communism, the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese Communist civil and criminal law, the reinterpretation of China’s history, economic planning, the Sino-Soviet dispute, and the philosophical debate on one dividing into two.

Each lesson has an explanatory introduction in English and is followed

by an extensive vocabulary list of the important terms and expressions

particularly those involving Communist jargon which are met with for

the first time in the reading. These lists give the Chinese characters, their romanization according to the Wade-Giles system, and an English translation. The vocabulary list entries are repeated in two comprehensive glossaries in the back of the book: one in romanized alphabetical order, the other by Chinese radical. Also included is a romanization conversion table for the Wade-Giles, Yale, National Romanization, and the P'in-yin system now used in Communist China. Finally, there is a comprehensive tabulation of the officially adopted simplified characters arranged by: (a) P'in-yin system;

(b) number of strokes in the simplified characters; and (c) number of strokes in the conventional characters.

A few more words about the vocabulary lists may be helpful:

(a) The vocabulary lists contain mostly compounds rather than single characters. The reason for this is that single characters can be easily found in a dictionary, and from many years of experience of teaching Chinese to American students, I have found that one of their greatest difficulties is in identifying the compounds. They spend endless time searching for nonexistent compounds, either because they incorrectly combine the characters to form a compound or because they divide the characters of an established compound. The difficulty is further intensified by the fact that newly coined Communist jargonisms and old expressions given new meanings by Communist usage cannot be found in an ordinary dictionary, and some of them not even in a Communist dictionary. The few exceptions of including single characters are limited to those which I