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In this paper I present Mao's historical view based on dialectical materialism, and I propose that this socialist historiography can help the current PRC regime to reflect on its relationship to its past and its future. As we know, the contradictions of capitalism and communism lie not only in the economic and political realms but also in the completely different senses of time they offer. In the case of Maoism, it is the unfixed future that agitates people to revolutionary action. I will explore what dialectics means to Maoism by exploring both the original texts of Mao and the exegesis of various Maoist scholars, and I will also study poems written by Mao to explore his romantic view of history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent debates within and beyond Marxism around empire and imperialism focus on deterritorialization, but fail to see non-Western states as anything other than collaborators or victims. Highlighting the importance of center-periphery relations within the territorially bounded political space of the nation-state, this paper puts forward a new concept of the Postcolonial Informal Empire (PIE) to characterize the emerging powers of China and India. The greatest paradox of PIEs is that a postcolonial impulse—to critically appropriate Western ideas and technologies such as sovereignty, nationalism, and the free market to build the multinational state and combine it with an affirmation of stories of historical greatness and long existing, pre-Westernized, civilizational-national cultures—enables the political entities to consolidate and discipline their borderlands and reduce diverse inhabiting peoples to culturally different but politically subservient subjects. It is predominantly a nationalist politics, and not economic calculability or financial interests, that shapes PIEs’ center-borderlands relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The problem of distributive justice has been widely discussed by Western and Chinese scholarship of Marxism. This interest results from the historical transformation of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, and also from the crucial transition in China beginning in the late 1970s. By conceptualizing the basic principle of distributive justice as “reward according to effort and ability,” this paper discusses the differences between liberal thought, as exemplified by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and the ideas of Karl Marx, from basic principles to context. It deals with the concept of “private property” or even “private ownership.” In Marx's view, the principle of distributive justice is necessarily betrayed under the condition of private ownership—the capitalist exploits workers—and the solution is the replacement of private by public ownership. Ultimately, the principle of justice is replaced by the principle of beyond justice. Nozick sees private ownership as the natural result of the principle, a condition he regards as self-ownership. Rawls shares this position with Nozick, but seeks to improve its operation with “justice as fairness,” which combines the principle of justice with the principle of beyond justice. Neither Nozick nor Rawls intuits that the principle itself would be betrayed under the condition of private ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]