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PARTISAN REVIEW
Zhou was also Wang Ruoshui's patron and ally. From Wang's other
articles we learn that in the early 1960s the two men had discussed
some of the theoretical debates taking place among East European
Marxists. Their discussion, stopped during the Cultural Revolu–
tion , now was brought into the open. On March 7, 1983, at a
meeting commemorating the centennial of Marx's death, at the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zhou Yang discussed aliena–
tion as part of his "inquiry into several problems of Marxism." And
he echoed the same charges raised by Wang Ruoshui.
In Zhou's speech, the definition of alienation is more properly
abstract: "In its process of development, a subject by its own action
creates something which is its opposite, and which then becomes an
external, alien force turning around and opposing or controlling the
subject itself." In practical terms, however, the definition may well
refer to the Chinese political system which has begotten its own
"alien forces," and Zhou argued that they must be confronted in
order to be resolved.
Whereas both Zhou and Wang give due prominence to the
1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,
their arguments are less
concerned with Marx's discussion of the alienating nature of capital–
ist production but, inspired perhaps by the East European Marxists,
they insist on a humanistic meaning to Marx's economic insight so
as to make the concept of alienation relevant to post-Mao China.
Wang Ruoshui, in particular, emphasized the humanistic back–
ground of Marx's formulations of alienation in order to buttress his
thesis that "the human being is the starting point of Marxism" and
that this position of humanism in Marx's philosophical system has
been "neglected by us."
In a 1983 article titled "The Case for Humanism" published in
a Shanghai Party journal,
Wenhui baa,
Wang Ruoshui went so far as
to open his article with a sentence evoking the first line of the
Com–
munist Manifesto:
"A spectre's shadow wanders in the Chinese in–
tellectual circles - the spectre of humanism." Indeed, the twin "spec–
tres" of alienation and humanism seem to have so overshadowed the
Chinese literary and scholarly scene as to become something of an
intellectual vogue!
The views of Wang and Zhou provoked strong rebuttals from
leading Party ideologues, including Deng Liqun (head of the Party's
propaganda department) , Xing Fensi (director of the Institute of
Philosophy, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Ru Xin (vice
president of the CASS and formerly deputy director of the
