ABSTRACT
The period between the publication of the Shanghai edition of Elements of Sociology in 1937 and his readmittance to the Chinese Communist Party in December 1949 was the least productive in Li Da's otherwise long and highly productive career. Li's association with Mao Zedong commenced at the time of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, though Li's reputation had reached Mao earlier through his articles and translations, particularly those in The Communist, and it is evident that Mao thought highly of Li as a theorist and educator. Mao's "On Practice" and "On Contradiction", essays which were to become the cornerstone of Chinese Marxism after 1949, was thus the vehicle whereby the concepts, categories, laws and modes of thought characteristic of orthodox Soviet philosophy of the 1931-1936 periods, were drawn into mainstream Chinese Marxism. Li's explanatory notes for reading "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" were originally written and published in instalments in the journal Xin Jianshe.
