In the mid-1950s in China, a few years after the Communist Party seized state power through decades of war and revolutionary mobilization, a serious discussion began over the process and philosophies of “socialist transition.” Carried out in the Marxist idioms of the day, these discussions were launched to contest the party-state orthodoxy of the time, which held that China could only realize socialism by ruthlessly subordinating transformations in social relations of production to the enhancement of the forces of production—that is, by subordinating revolution in social class power to a brutal economistic logic. This inherited Stalinist orthodoxy—implacably stage-ist and narrowly focused on measurable/countable growth parameters—had been implemented through the First Five-Year Plan, after land reforms ended in 1952. A few short years later, by the mid-1950s, this Stalinist dogma was being subjected to critique not only by Mao Zedong himself (at first mildly and then boldly), but notably also by intellectuals who often operated, at that time, outside the confines of Party orthodoxy. Some of these intellectuals subsequently moved to the center of Party policy, but only once they had succeeded in helping change the Party’s own direction in the 1960s. Some, therefore, participated in the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976), which was still a decade away from the time of the debates around “socialist transition” that we take up in the following special section.

We present this special forum of textual translations and analytical commentary on socialist transition in China to readers of Modern Intellectual History in order to restore complexity to the socialist period and to argue several things. At the most basic and yet most expansive, we argue implicitly and explicitly that Chinese intellectuals thought creatively and deeply about Marxism-in-action through their attempts to address philosophically, and solve practically, real-world problems when faced with the enormity of constructing socialism in China’s 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. These creative attempts are instructive for us all, as we try to disentangle historical monoliths from their ensiloed academic and intellectual locations. Second, and relatedly, we argue implicitly and explicitly that the field of China studies often has insulated itself from the complexity of the socialist period through the establishment of an ideological hegemony that dismisses some intellectuals and thinking in favor of highlighting others. This hegemonic ideological approach holds that those who disputed more radical versions of socialism in the 1950s—and thus those who “won” the intellectual and political battles of the 1980s’ transition out of socialism—are the only intellectuals worthy of consideration today. This ideological approach shapes more general post-Mao thinking about the economy and converges neatly with the reorientation under Deng Xiaoping (in the 1980s) of the Chinese state itself towards strict economistic policies and capitalist accumulation.Footnote ¹

The following translations and accompanying commentaries contest this post-1980 ideological rigidity quite robustly by proposing that the Mao-era Chinese Revolution generated lively and philosophically important interventions and critiques around problems of socialist transition. The thinkers we translate here are, almost without exception, ones that the contemporary Chinese state wishes were forgotten in the current zeal to erase a socialist revolutionary alternative to the present of capitalist globalization. Our interventions thus are self-consciously partisan—they propose individually and collectively that a socialist alternative was thinkable in China in the 1950s—even while we each also maintain an honest attitude towards the potential realization of this possibility in that time. We do not surround the texts with too much academic armature from scholars of the PRC or elsewhere, as our project is aimed at demonstrating how thinkers in and about socialism in China as it was being pursued seriously can produce theoretical reflections on their times, and perhaps even on ours. While no historical text can “speak” autonomously, we nevertheless wish to maintain that these texts helped produce the possibility of socialism—as a philosophical and practical reality—rather than reducing the texts to evidentiary data in a context that is always-already formed. That the socialism as these texts conceived it was abandoned in the 1980s and that these intellectuals became anathema to academic and state authorities are later developments that do not explicitly concern us here.

Third, then, we argue implicitly and explicitly that intellectuals whose thought subsequently has been dismissed because of their later participation in the Cultural Revolution—in particular the now-despised Yao Wenyuan, who was put on trial as a prominent member of the “Gang of Four” after the end of the Cultural Revolution,Footnote ² but who, leading up to that time, was an important and influential theorist of socialist aesthetics—should in fact be treated as having had important things to say about the emergent relation between socialism and China.

The translations and accompanying commentaries place all of our thinkers in a complex historical milieu, one that includes the struggles and the violences that produced a lived experience of socialism in China at the time, as well as an intellectual milieu helping shape the creative and forward-looking philosophies that tried to imagine what socialism in China could be. Our choice of thinkers and texts is neither arbitrary nor representative. That is, we present these thinkers not to give a sweep of the possible intellectual waterfront at the time—there are other writers on this and many other issues debated during this period; indeed, socialism was nothing if not highly and consistently contested! Likewise, we have not striven for representative inclusionism. Lamentably, our thinkers are all men; even so, a few think deeply about the problem of social reproduction. Feminist and women intellectuals of course existed in some numbers, but none was involved in these debates on socialist transition.Footnote ³

We offer these translations and commentaries to give a sense of what thinking about “socialist transition” in its more theoretically sophisticated and thoroughgoing forms looked like in China prior to the onset of the Cultural Revolution. We chose our texts to present some of the more important theoretical interventions and to highlight the creative energy of thinkers from China on the problems raised by the challenges of socialist transition. They stand as a testament to the seriousness of theory building and the genuine attempts to rethink and reshape social practice in China under socialism. These thinkers and their texts deserve to be read by intellectual historians, who have hitherto had no access to them because they have not previously been translated from Chinese.

This special forum on the intellectual history of socialist transition in China emerged originally from a two-part ACLS-funded workshop—Socialism in/as Theory—held in separate stages, first at Columbia University and then at Rebecca Karl’s home in May and December 2022, with substantially overlapping participants.Footnote ⁴ Co-organized by Rebecca Karl, Benjamin Kindler, and Harlan Chambers, the workshops allowed a group of us interested in the political economy and cultural-narrative production of socialist transition to read together a set of primary texts and to take them up as analytical objects of historical and literary study. We selected texts that spoke to one another—and spoke to us—across historical debates and divides of what can be considered the transitional period (1940s–1960s). Rather than let the intensity of our discussions dissipate, we decided to make some of the texts and our interpretations available to an audience that does not read Chinese. The translations and explications gathered here present possible approaches to issues in political economy as they intersect with critical cultural studies and historical problems of global socialism and socialist transition in Mao-era China. We consider them an opening to dialogue across approaches to intellectual history.

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If we take the 1961 Yao Wenyuan article, translated by Angie Baecker, as an emergent exemplary approach to the relationship between aesthetics and politics under socialist construction, then we can appreciate how it both summarizes and cuts short possibilities for the development of socialist cultural politics. Previous debates on the potential dialectic between art and politics were by this time somewhat resolved into an adumbrated policy that would guide the production of culture to further socialist transformation. As Baecker notes, Yao’s article became a touchstone of how “beauty” was to be understood, not as an ahistorical sublime but as a historicized mode of seeing. And, as we must remind ourselves, socialism had to be beautiful if it was to distinguish itself from the ugliness of capitalism. In this text, Yao joins a discussion on aesthetics that had begun long before, in China as in Euro-America-Japan, and yet he turns the aesthetic into a problem of proletarian social form (xingshi 形式), thus incipiently mandating a certain set of visual and interpretive parameters for socialist cultural production in China. While Yao’s participation in the anti-Hu Feng campaign (in 1955) and in the later Cultural Revolution’s so-called “Gang of Four” has marked him out for derision and dismissal as a socialist theorist, Baecker reminds us that Yao’s interventions were of their time and in a time when socialism was still a serious proposition and cultural production was still considered a vital mode of shaping a mass socialist practice through its a priori imaginative capacities.

How were Marxist theorists in China to think the problem of socialist economics seriously? How were the practices and concepts of economics to be elaborated and transformed into socialism in a nonmechanistic manner? Of roughly the same historical moment as Yao’s essay, Ai Siqi’s contribution (1962), in Harlan Chambers’s translation and explication, makes clear that Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program looms large over discussions of the political and economic form that socialism was in the process of realizing in China. The fact of labor as the basis of all social equivalence, of value as the mode of measuring that equivalence, of the persistence of the commodity form, and yet the contradiction occasioned between inherited forms of private ownership of labor power and the actual collectivization of social life, bedeviled the desired transition to socialism in theoretical and practical terms. Alone among the theorists translated here, Ai addresses the problem of the family and the social reproduction of labor, with the family form charting both a past and a transformed future of communist possibility. However, with no way to resolve definitively the gendered problem of social reproduction within the structures of patriarchy and productivism, Ai’s insights in this regard ultimately led nowhere. By the same token, if we understand the Critique of the Gotha Program to stand consistently at the center of Chinese theoretical discussions of the possibilities for a socialist economics and social form, particularly through the Marxist critique of bourgeois right, then we can see how Ai’s reflections on the remnants of and the emerging relation between labor power, value, compensation, commodities, social forms, and the socialist state are serious contributions to a Marxist theory of practice, even if the conundrums he catalogues remained irresolvable in their own terms at that time.

Both Yao’s and Ai’s essays emerge from the post-Great Leap moments of disappointment, disillusion, and shock over the scale of human destruction.Footnote ⁵ They can be seen, thus, as attempts to restart and retheorize the socialist project after the massive defeat and the subsequent retreat into what historian Maurice Meisner called the post-Leap Thermidorean Reaction. In this vein, they take up and advance long-standing issues in Marxism and in the Chinese practice of socialism, attempting to reanimate theoretically and in practice a dynamic process of social transformation aimed not at restoring capitalism but at constructing socialism in China. While Ai Siqi was, by the 1960s, an older member of the Communist Party leadership whose theoretical acumen was well established and yet who continued to contest Party orthodoxies, Yao Wenyuan was at that time an emergent theorist of socialist aesthetics. Meanwhile, the other writers in our collection—Wang Yanan, Jian Bozan, and Yang Tingbao—were all, by the 1950s and 1960s, well along in their careers as Marxist theorists.

Going back, then, to the pre-Great Leap moment of 1956, we consider a time when some of China’s economic theorists were striking out independently from the imperatives and shadow of Stalinism, and when, consequently, a robust debate about the possibilities for a socialist law of value were being engaged. Cynthia Gao translates and comments on Wang Yanan’s injunction to detach concepts of socialism from the perspective of an economics disciplinary practice that was still wedded and beholden to its capitalist point of origin. In this text, Wang laid down a conceptual challenge for social scientists in China at the time. Gao’s translation and discussion of Wang’s text gives us insight into the unique ways in which Wang merged his concerns about political economy and narrative forms into an integrated critique of extant social-scientific practice in China. Wang offers the fundamental insight that socialist economics cannot be merely a method but has to be a principle of practice and that this principle must be narrated in a defamiliarized form. He urged his colleagues—ultimately unsuccessfully—to break down the barriers to thinking economics anew, and to creatively rejoin the theory and practice of the economic to the realities of an emergent and constantly changing everyday life that imagines socialism in the here and now.

Architecture and design, as a patterning of everyday life in the literal building of structures of socialism, became a major arena of debated practice, problematizing the relation between culture and technology in the realization of new styles of work and creativity. Yang Tingbao’s two essays on socialist architecture (1956, 1961), translated and discussed by Sam Hellmann, straddle the Great Leap and the Sino-Soviet split. In introducing a figure relatively unknown to theorists of socialist architecture, Hellmann indicates the complexities involved in marrying socialist demands to Chinese design in the context of the realities of resource scarcity and lack of expertise. Yang argues that, just as a cut-and-paste design method had to be vanquished, so did the bureaucratism surrounding the construction of any given building. Meanwhile, the problem of architectural style needed to be addressed. As Hellmann explicates, via Yang’s text, the demands of socialist architecture had to answer not only to proletarian function and economy, but also to creating “as much beauty” as could be mustered. This rendered the architect not into an engineer, but into a “culture worker,” in the imaginative sense that Mao Zedong had invested into that category in his 1942 “Talks on Literature and Art at the Yan’an Forum.” The classed nature of design, space, and form thus became a major consideration, and yet to avoid strict economism mandated an attention to the forms of labor and conceptualization that comprise a socialist building, as well as to an aesthetic principle of use that had to be grounded in life and thus could not be abstracted into the reified, linear process of the plan.

One of the major concerns of the Chinese Revolution in general and the socialist transition in particular was how to link the present to the past—or, that is, how to write history in a universal but specific Marxist mode. In Joanna Suwen Lee-Brown’s translation of Jian Bozan’s 1963 article, originally written for a wide readership and published in one of the major newspapers of the time, we can see how some of the main issues in Marxist theories of history could be prised open through the problem of how to write a history of China that did not bypass its particularities but nevertheless ended in socialist revolutionary transformation. The simplicity of Jian’s language and presentation conceals a sophisticated engagement with Marxist theories of history. Jian pays specific attention to ethnic relations, to the possibilities and limitations of peasant uprisings and consciousness, to religion, and to the unevenness of foreign interactions, through which he indicates some of the major scholarly and ideological debates in historiography of the time. Meanwhile, he suggests how historians might deal with the contradictions on offer in a comprehensive way. Jian Bozan was one of the few PRC-aligned Uyghur historians of his generation, and he had a major role in launching ethnic(-minority) studies in China. He was a passionate historicist, who insisted on the complex determinations of history rather than a single through-line of interpretive theory. Ultimately, his position lost out to the supporters of the class viewpoint, whose increasingly dogmatic approach to writing all history/histories in the idiom of class struggle came to inform the Cultural Revolutionary decade.

Finally, then, Wang Yanan’s 1942 essay on the human in political economy, as translated and discussed by Benjamin Kindler, helped set the stage philosophically (not necessarily causally) for the debates that followed. We place it last in the collection so that it can provide a vantage on the discussions that came in its wake. If one of the major problems emerging out of the socialist transition in the 1950s and 1960s was the narrative subject of history, and if one of the major aspirations of socialism was the production of a new socialist human/political subject, then the naturalized individual subject who appears as “economic man” (homo economicus) needed to be exposed, historicized, vanquished, and replaced. Prior to the seizure of state power by the CCP, Wang took up this problem in his extended critiques in the 1940s of capitalist political economy, as well as in his postrevolutionary engagements in socialist political-economic theorization.Footnote ⁶ As Kindler thoroughly explicates, Wang’s concern with “economic man” is both a Marxist topos in itself and also points to his larger project of critique as the horizon of thinking and practice in the postrevolutionary moment. It speaks, then, to how history will have been written—from which subject/narrator’s perspective—and how to historicize and concretize the categories of social-scientific practice and investigation. For Wang, and some others of the time, the potential success of socialism depended substantially on this form of defamiliarizing and denaturalizing categories of thought and practice, in order to open the future to noncapitalist possibilities.