Instructions of the Central Military Commission
on the Problem of Consolidating the
Anti-Japanese University
(July 1939)

The overall policy for running the Anti-Japanese University and all other military
and political schools and training groups organized by intellectuals should be as
follows:
1. Training educated youth into proletarian soldiers or sympathizers and training them to become cadres of the Eighth Route Army are indeed hard work. We
should endeavor to transform their thinking, pay attention to the process of their
ideological transformation, and organize ideological contests and debates in appropriate ways. In reality, there must be struggles between bourgeois ideas and
proletarian ideas in these schools.
2. All the work of schools should be aimed at transforming the thinking of
students. Political education is the central link. There should not be too many
courses, but the work of class education and Party education must be greatly
strengthened. The Anti-Japanese University is not a school of the united front, but
a school for Eighth Route Army cadres under the leadership of the Party.
3. The principles for educating intellectual youth are the following:
a. Educate them to master Marxism-Leninism, and to overcome bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois thinking and ideas.
b. Educate them to be disciplined and organized and to oppose anarchism and
liberalism.
c. Educate them to go resolutely down to work at the grass roots and to oppose
looking down on practical experience.
d. Educate them to be close to the workers and peasants and to oppose the attitude of looking down on the workers and peasants.

--- Notes

Our source for this document is _Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan_, Vol. 6, pp. 93–94, where it is
reproduced from the guide to an exhibition at the Military Museum in Beijing.