Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies ›› 2018, Vol. 18 ›› Issue (03): 33-47.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2018.03.006

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Manifesto of the Communist Party as Source of the “Concept of a Community of Shared Future for Mankind”: An Interpretation of the Preface in the German Version of the Manifesto of the Communist Party

WU Jianguang   

  • Published:2020-07-25

Abstract: The Manifesto of the Communist Party, which was mainly written by Karl Marx, is the birth certificate of the communism. Considered as the first guiding document of the scientific communism and the source of China's proposition in the 21th Century, which plans to forge the concept of a community of shared future for mankind, the “Manifesto” elaborates the great communistic theory roundly and systematically. A word-for-word and sentence-for-sentence analyze of this classic is therefore of necessity. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. The Manifesto of the Communist Party conveys its thought originally and specifically through German, not through any other language. Undoubtedly, the German version of the “Manifesto” is the original (Urbild) and any translated version is therefore the reproduction (Abbild). This paper plans to comprehensively analyze and illuminate the lexical-conceptional structure, the syntactic structure and the textual cohesion-coherence-intertextual structure of the preface in the German version of the “Manifesto” to demonstrate what makes this document a significant classic, and to support the basic argument, that a serious and rigorous academic research should never be based on the reproduction and neglect the original, which is of the essence. Only on the basic of academic researches is the understanding of the basic thought in the “Manifesto” possible and the Sinicization of Marxism realizable.

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