Editing China (section)

=== Marxist Critiques and Lay Buddhist-Marxist Synthesis ===
The Nationalist-Communist civil conflict and the consolidation of Communist Party rule after 1927 drew Buddhism ever more directly into the ideological apparatus of the new order, both as an object of Marxist critique and, after 1949, as a resource the Party sought to accommodate and instrumentalize rather than simply suppress. Senior Party figures developed their own assessments of Buddhism well before Liberation: Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白), an early Party leader, credited Buddhist ideas of impermanence and the bodhisattva path with shaping his own turn toward revolution, while Mao Zedong articulated a durable official framework treating Buddhism as cultural heritage, a repository of a "fine tradition" to be selectively preserved and mobilized, and a body of thought capable of coordination with socialism.<ref>Li Guangliang (2001), 〈马克思主义的佛教观〉, sec. 2.</ref> After 1949, academic Marxist historians, notably Hou Wailu (侯外廬/侯外庐) and Ren Jiyu (任繼愈/任继愈), applied class analysis systematically to classical Buddhist philosophy, treating its idealist metaphysics as ideological superstructure serving feudal landlord interests while still crediting Buddhist logic with a genuine, if ultimately compromised, dialectical content; Fan Wenlan (范文瀾/范文澜) offered a considerably more polemical rejection of Buddhism as systematic deception of the oppressed, dismissing Buddhist scripture wholesale as "lies from beginning to end."<ref>Li Guangliang (2001), 〈马克思主义的佛教观〉, sec. 2.</ref> Against this current of Marxist critique, a distinct cohort of lay Buddhist intellectuals worked from the 1930s into the early 1950s to demonstrate compatibility, or even convergence, between Buddhist philosophy and Marxist dialectics. Wang Xiaoxu (王小徐) argued that classical Buddhist metaphysics achieved a more thoroughgoing dialectic than Hegel or Marx, since the latter could not consistently apply the logic of historical negation to the proletariat's own future communist society, while You Zhibiao (尤智表) and Su Yuanlei (蘇淵雷/苏渊雷) drew systematic parallels between Mahāyāna philosophy, relativity theory, and Marxist historical and dialectical materialism across the domains of worldview, society, and human life.<ref>Li Guangliang (2001), 〈马克思主义的佛教观〉, sec. 3.</ref> The two most systematic and totalizing such syntheses, however, were those of the lay intellectuals Wen Guangxi and Chen Mingshu.