Collected Annotations of Mao Zedong on Philosophy

A collection of Mao Zedong's annotations on philosophy. It was edited by the Party Literature Research Office of the Central Committee of the CPC and published by the Central Literature Publishing House in 1988. The whole book contains annotations and excerpts from 10 books on philosophy studied by Mao Zedong from 1936 to 1965. The editor of the book followed the principle of seeking truth from facts and had not made any changes to the original text, keeping the original appearance of the material. In order to make the reader better understand Mao’s annotations, the editor had added comments on some characters, events, proper names and allusions in the book. The entire book is about 310,000 words, and most of the contents were published for the first time.

Mao Zedong read many philosophical works during the Yan'an period and after the founding of New China, and wrote a large number of comments, annotations, opinions and summaries of the main points of them. As for the Collected Annotations of Mao Zedong on Philosophy, it contains 666 annotations, plus interlinear annotations, a total of 692. From the content of the annotations, there are brief summaries of the main points of original books, some comments on certain formulations and theses of original books, some additions to certain theses of original books, some interpretations of some philosophical issues in the light of Chinese practical experience, and some discussions of Chinese society and the Chinese revolution. The philosophical ideas contained in these annotations are extremely rich, covering the issues of the criteria for the division of philosophical schools, the dialectics of the three stages of the process of cognition, the absolute nature of struggle and the relativity of unity, the theory of the principal and non-principal contradictions, the principal and non-principal aspects of contradictions and their transformation, the three laws of materialist dialectics and their relations, the idea of "the middle zone", the question of theoretical methodology, and so on. They reflect Mao's materialist dialectics, epistemology and historical view, and always run through the red line of combining theory and practice.

The Collected Annotations of Mao Zedong on Philosophy authentically records Mao Zedong's thinking on philosophical issues in different historical periods, complements and enriches his philosophical thinking, reflects the historical process of the development of it, and also reveals the influence of general philosophical thinking on the formation and development of Mao's own philosophical thinking in the 1930s. It is an important documentary source for studying the development trajectory of Mao Zedong's philosophical thinking and exploring the essentials of his philosophical thinking, with high documentary and theoretical value.