Background
Guo, Moruo was born in 1892 in Loshan, Sichuan Province, Ghina.
essayist historian novelist playwright poet
Guo, Moruo was born in 1892 in Loshan, Sichuan Province, Ghina.
Editor of magazines of be Creation Society. Chairman, Department of l-Uerature, Zhongshan University, Guangzhou. Pr°paganda and political posts attached to y-hiang Kai-shek and the National Revolutionary Army.
1928-1938, exile in Ichikawa as an enemy of the National Government. 1949, Chairman, All-China Federation of Writers and Artists. Member, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
President, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Although trained in medicine, Guo devoted his life to literature and politics. The breadth of his talents enabled him to make important contributions to many other fields, including philosophy, archaeology, economics, history and sociology. His first intellectual enthusiasm was for romanticism, which infused his writing for the Culture Society in the early 1920s, but in 1925 he became a Marxist, supporting a Leninist theory of imperialism and seeing literature as a political weapon. His subsequent studies of Chinese history and intellectual life employed a materialist method, using forces and relations of production to provide the underlying explanation of cultural developments. Most significantly for later Chinese philosophical studies, he rejected the view that China had a static essence and proposed instead that Chinese history should, like Western history, be broken into periods based on changing modes of production, thus repairing the omission of China from the historical writings of Marx and Engels. Philosophers could be interpreted according to their class position in their historical period as progressive or reactionary, materialist or idealist. Subsequent Marxist history of philosophy in China has been dominated by arguments accepting Guo’s basic methodological framework, but questioning his determination of historical periods and assessment of individual figures. Within the framework of his method, the evaluation of an ancient philosopher could change completely from reactionary to progressive, depending on whether his society was dominated by slave-owners or landlords. Guo altered his scheme of historical periods, with his 1950 account ‘Slave society in China'. The nearly universal acceptance of this version of his scheme contributed to his position of dominance among post-Liberation Chinese intellectuals. Although his historical work showed brilliance and audacity in the use of archaeological and palaeographic studies, including his own, his extreme conclusions about individual philosophers were often controversial, showing that his universal method left much room for ideosyncratic application. He praised Kongzi as a revolutionary figure and condemned Mozi, the pre-Qin dynasty philosopher closest to the people, as a reactionary supporter of the ruling class. He was less unorthodox in condemning the legalist Han Feizi as the intellectual originator of dictatorship in China.