Thinking About A Number Of Socialist Political Civilization

Socialist political civilization has become one of the attracting subjects for researchers again, since Jiang Zemin (former general secretary of Communist Party of China) put forward the concept of socialist political civilization. Among the authors of Marxist classics, however, only Marx used the word of political civilization once and he didn't explain it. Therefore, the research on socialist political civilization lacks support from Marxist classics.In fact, it took the members of CPC a long time to realize socialist political civilization. Before founding the PRC and at the primary stage of the country, the chief leaders of the Party and the country, including Mao Zedong, seldom used the word of civilization from political angle. The political report of 12th National Congress of CPC mentioned the construction of socialist material civilization and socialist spiritual civilization, which raised discussions on civilization. The discussions have advanced gradually and made many useful achievements. But the scholars have not reached agreements on many problems.The author of this article begins expressing his ideas from the connotations of culture and civilization. There are many definitions of these words. The author thinks that the people use the words in three types of linguistic environments: common life, politics and academy. And the two words are different. Compared with culture, civilization has characteristics of positiveness, universality and integrity in nature. The article categorizes culture and civilization, gives broad sense and narrow sense of political civilization. The article analyzes the relations between political civilization and political culture, political development, political modernization. Then political civilization is classified in the article and the discussion is introduced into socialist political civilization.The author researches establishing socialist political civilization from two angles. First, the author suggests that we should progress to socialist political civilization step by step, reduce costs and coordinate it with socialist material civilization and socialist spiritual civilization. Second, the author points out that developing socialist democracy is essential requirement of establishing socialist political civilization. The key to developing socialist democracy, proposed by Jiang Zemin, which is to combine the need to uphold the Party's leadership and to ensure that the people are the masters of the country with the need to rule the country by law, can be applied to establishing socialist political civilization. The three aspects are united together in theory. But they conflict with each other in practice sometimes. We must carry out the Party's decisions, pay attention to the new situation and sum up new experience. It's essential for us to use the experience of other countries for reference, especially the experience of developed capitalist countries. And we can surpass capitalist political civilization eventually...