Abstract

Marx’s concept of ideology first appeared in the Chinese context as the term “ideal ”; and Marx’s “form of consciousness” was expressed as “ideology” in Chinese. All this come from the initial use of the term in the Japanese version and later the Chinese version of ‘1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economics’. But interestingly, though Cheng Fangwu was the first to make the German Ideologie correspond directly to the Chinese “ideology” in 1927, during the first half of the 20th century, the main theorists in China theoretical circles as a whole seemed to have a natural tendency to use Marx’s concept of ideology in the name of “ideal form”, and still persisted in understanding Marx’s concept of ideology as form of social consciousness in general instead of as its specific form.