Popular Philosophy by Ai Siqi Review: A Landmark Work of Marxist Popularisation

Popular Philosophy is a work of Marxist philosophy written by Ai Siqi — the pen name of Li Shengxuan (1910–1966), a Chinese Marxist philosopher — and translated into English by Lili Tao. The book sets out to explain three interlocking pillars of Marxist theory — materialism, epistemology, and dialectics — to a general reading public rather than to a specialist academic audience. As an analysis published in the Proceedings of the 2017 3rd International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education (Atlantis Press) describes it, the work is "a concise popular reading of Marxist basic theory" that addresses its subjects "with extremely plain, vivid and popular language." The text is structured across five chapters: an introduction, a treatment of dualism and materialism, epistemology of dialectical materialism, the basic laws of materialist dialectics, and several further concepts in materialist dialectics — comprising 22 distinct pieces in total.

The book's origins illuminate its importance. Ai Siqi came to write Popular Philosophy after being introduced to the Chinese Social Scientists Association and taking up work on the magazine Reading Life and the Shenbao library — experiences that gave him both the intellectual network and the popular platform to produce a work aimed squarely at mass readership. Published in China in the 1930s during a period of intense political and ideological contest, the text engaged directly with rival philosophical positions of the era, including what Ai Siqi characterised as the idealism underlying the Vitalism of Chen Lifu and Chiang Kai-shek's Philosophy of Practice with Earnestness, arguing in contrast for Marxist dialectical materialism as the philosophical foundation of China's revolutionary labour movement. A collected edition was published by People's Publishing House in Beijing in 1981, attesting to the book's long institutional standing within Chinese Marxist culture.

The defining characteristic of Popular Philosophy, as scholars have consistently noted, is its deliberate accessibility. Chunying Chen's conference paper on the work highlights that Ai Siqi's method combines plain language with vivid illustration, making abstract philosophical categories navigable for readers without prior training in academic philosophy. The book's design intent is to draw people's practice as the basis of theoretical study and to connect theory with conditions specific to China — a combination that, as the Atlantis Press analysis notes, "gained widely support from the people for Marxist philosophy." This dual commitment to philosophical rigour and everyday intelligibility gives the text its distinctive character among works of political philosophy from the same period.

At 22 pieces arranged across five chapters, Popular Philosophy is systematically organised — moving from foundational ontological questions through epistemology and into the mechanics of dialectical reasoning. This architecture makes the book useful as an introduction to Marxist philosophy for readers approaching it from scratch, though the text's ideological commitments are unambiguous and explicit: it argues for the superiority of dialectical materialism over competing worldviews and frames its philosophical analysis within the context of Chinese Communist Party thought. Readers seeking a neutral comparative survey of philosophical traditions will find that the text is an argument, not a survey. The English edition translated by Lili Tao runs to 517 pages, meaning this is not a short primer but a substantive volume — the full scope of Ai Siqi's original undertaking.

The Cosmos Publishing Group INC edition, published in June 2025, makes a text long central to the study of Chinese intellectual and political history available in English in a single volume. It will be of clear value to students and scholars of modern Chinese history, Marxist philosophy, and the history of political thought, as well as to general readers with an interest in how Marxist ideas were shaped and transmitted in a specifically Chinese context. Ai Siqi's reputation — studied by scholars including Joshua A. Fogel, whose work on Ai's contribution to the development of Chinese Marxism is published through the Harvard Contemporary China Series — ensures that this edition enters a well-established field of scholarly inquiry. For those approaching Marxist philosophy through its twentieth-century Chinese expression rather than its European origins, Popular Philosophy remains a primary document.