https://nitter.net/wentisung/status/1713403182184022407#m

  • Vode An@lemmy.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    Anything you recommend reading if I want to explore the intersection of Taoism and Marxism?

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Can tell you that Mao created a Criticize lin, criticize Confucius campaign. Westerners take this as destroying eastern religions, but on the contrary it was designed to center Marxist aspects of specific religions in discussions and teachings. Essentially it was an extension of liberation theology

      • Vode An@lemmy.ml
        ·
        1 year ago

        That sounds like a worthwhile read, is there a good starting point for that specific part of the topic?

        • kristina [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          idk if there are many english speaking texts relating to this. here is course material on this subject from beijing university. you could run it through a translator

          http://www.shehui.pku.edu.cn/upload/editor/file/20220118/20220118160716_5274.pdf

          here is a website that has the pdf if you wanna just use a browser's translate option

          https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA4Mjg3MTYyMA==&mid=409949253&idx=1&sn=22f3ed891c8c6e04825a56881644d130

            • kristina [she/her]
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              edit-2
              1 year ago

              no prob, strongly recommend using baidu and translators for research. there are a lot of lies that the west tells that are very easily verifiable just with a quick search on baidu (recently there was a campaign about how china bans winnie the pooh. you can search it on baidu and find millions of examples of winnie the pooh in china. the only 'banning' of winnie the pooh was a racist caricature and it was on only one social media site where it was a problem). there are also lots of lies about china banning certain video games and movies, when you can easily search and find it false.

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Essentially it was an extension of liberation theology

        that sounds like a really clunky metaphor that's trying too hard to Christianise Chinese religion. They're entirely different

        • kristina [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          im of the opinion that liberation theology is just interpreting any religion through a marxist lens, not just the natopedia definition that purely is about christianity. its a thing that happens a lot and to constrain the definition to christianity is weird

          • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
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            edit-2
            1 year ago

            But liberation theology was the actual name of a Christian movement that sought to do that. When other religions do the same thing I think it should have its own name because it's weird to just give them all the Christian name for it. It's like saying you've been going to a Hindu church

            I am pretty sure the name for the combination of Confucianism and Marxism is Confucian Marxism for example

            that's what this paper from a Chinese university's school of Marxism studies called it anyway

            • kristina [she/her]
              ·
              1 year ago

              sure, but to me i think there is value in having a general term for an interpretation of religion through marxism. there isnt anything inherently christian about the name 'liberation theology'.

    • AlpineSteakHouse [any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Honestly, I've just been reading the classic Tao texts. It's been a personal project and I don't think there's much of an academic interest. At least until I saw this.

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        there is academic interest in china at least. in the west, its only used as a vector of attack on china in most books

    • Nacarbac [any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Best way would be to just read the Dao De Jing (essentially a short collection of poetic philosophical points), which is the core text, and then the Zhuangzi (a larger text created over centuries, expanding on the topic with various characters - quite humorous). With the latter, being the product of dozens of authors, in a few chapters you can feel the philosophy being bent towards "actually, political hierarchies and wealth disparity are natural law and therefore cool", but they rather stand out.

      Ursula Le Guin's translation is my favorite, but the differences between translations are interesting - both texts have a lot of fun with the ambiguity of language.