Conversation with G. Stein[1]

(1944)

I am still a pupil, a pupil of the masses. If we are to win the war and secure peace, the ideas and experience of the masses must form the basis of our policies, for ordinary people can teach us a great deal. Our task is to listen to their opinions, learn from their experience, discern their wishes and criticisms, define in sum total what they want, and hand it back to them as policy.

You must not strike at a person who is ill; you must strike at the illness.

All communists, in every country, share only one thing in common: their political method of thought, all following the path of Marxism-Leninism. Communists everywhere must distinguish between this method of thought and something entirely different — the communist social and organizational system which is the ultimate political goal of that method of thought. Especially here in China, we must draw a strict line between, on the one hand, the communist way of observing, studying and solving social problems, and, on the other hand, our actual policies of New Democracy, which must be our immediate goal in the new stage of China’s social development. Without the communist method of thought, we cannot guide the democratic stage of our present social revolution. And without political New Democracy, we cannot correctly apply our communist philosophy to China’s realities.

[1] Part of a conversation between Mao Zedong and G. Stein, correspondent of the British *News Chronicle*.