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The term socialism stands for very different, partially contradictory ideologies and social and political movements. In a larger sense they strive, each with different methodological approaches and strategies, to integrate the individual into the social order, and in a narrower sense they aim at a radical egalitarianism. The latter's goal is an equal distribution of goods, community control over the means of production, and the end of exploitation of people by people. Socialist ideas are found in the thought of nearly all reformers at the end of the Qing Dynasty. Am…

Western social-science literature (social-science research on China) frequently points out that the development of nationalism primarily emanates from two sources. First, it says that there is a close relationship between the development of liberal nationalism and the bourgeois revolutions in America and France in the 18th century. Second, almost simultaneously one can observe the evolution of a nationalism of a more ethnic-cultural character, especially in Germany. Both forms, liberal and ethni…

Before the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), there was no political philosophy or political movement which would have been equivalent to Liberalism ( ziyouzhuyi) in the Western sense of the word. However, there have been approaches in Chinese classical political thought which are closely related to the basic concepts of Western Liberalism, such as the ideas of humanity, the uniqueness of the individual, resistance against the ruler, and finally even traces of the sovereignty of the people (for example in the works …

The concept of Marxism-Leninism arose in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s, in connection with Stalin's formulation of Leninism as the further development of Marxism. In 1926 Marxism and Leninism were declared equivalent components of the Soviet philosophy. In the following years, the term became generally accepted as the official designation of the Soviet philosophy and of state orthodoxy. Marxism-Leninism in the former Soviet Union, as well as in today's PRC, comprises the teachings of Karl Ma…