International Journal of Asian Studies (2021), 1–18 doi:10.1017/S1479591421000139 RESEARCH ARTICLE . The struggle for memory: Jian Bozan on historical materialism Dawid Rogacz Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland Author for correspondence: Dawid Rogacz, E-mail:
[email protected] (Received 16 December 2020; revised 6 April 2021; accepted 8 April 2021) https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms Abstract This paper offers a first analysis of the philosophy of history developed by Jian Bozan (1898–1968), the author of China’s earliest comprehensive exposition of historical materialism. Despite his central import- ance for the establishment of professional historical studies in PRC, the existing studies neglect Jian’s ori- ginal contribution to the development of Chinese Marxism and his pre-war works in general, focusing solely on his participation in the debate over the relation between history and theory in the 1960s. The paper seeks to fill this lacuna by providing a critical account of Jian Bozan’s understanding of historical laws, progress, the stages of history, human freedom and the class struggle. Jian’s synthesis of historicism and historical materialism, which at a time was seen as an alternative to the Maoist view of history, was officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution and led to his premature death. However, this paper demonstrates that, following the public rehabilitation of the thought of Jian Bozan in 1978, it was his sys- tem that had an important impact on the historiography in Dengist China. Furthermore, the paper argues that Jian’s approach to historical materialism brought many novelties in relation to the preceding Sino- Marxist views of history.