 In the 17th century, the Academy of the Eastern Forest (Donglin shuyuan 東林書院) and the materialist philosopher Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) advocated the priority of action (xing). Since this position was in opposition to the views of the orthodox Neo-Confucians, and since it represented a new, predominantly materialistic opposition to the Neo-Confucian tradition, it set the stage for the ideological struggles which took place during the last Chinese dynasty. The contribution of scholars from the School of Practical Learning (shixue 實學) is especially valuable in the context of the further development of the binary category of knowledge and action. Due to their rediscovery of the orthodox classics and their unstinting emphasis on the significance of the practical applicability of ideas, they not only consistently placed the archaic connection between knowledge and action at the center of epistemological thought, but also gave it a more concrete emphasis, as in the relationship between thought and (political) practice. This rediscovered and somehow remodeled traditional connection would subsequently influence the great majority of later Chinese theories of knowledge, while also underpinning one of the crucial approaches to the specifically Chinese understanding of Marxist philosophy. In his essay “On Praxis” (Shijian lun), even Mao Zedong explicitly argued for a similar epistemological and axiological primacy of praxis over theory (2014: 8). It should be pointed out, however, that in their social theories, Chinese Marxists subscribed to the idea of the inseparability and dialectical relation of both categories, which in the context of Chinese ideational tradition had always been viewed in terms of complementary bipolarity. Although they considered social praxis as the element which imparted meaning to any (theoretical) reasoning, it was precisely this kind of renewed synthesis of knowledge and action which formed the epistemological bridge linking the classical Chinese tradition to the new ideas of Western Modernity.