It must be pointed out that, even to this day, there are still quite a number of Party members, cadres, trade union officials, and even leading comrades holding senior leadership positions within the Communist Party of China who lack a proper understanding of the Party’s industrial policy and the line for the workers’ movement.
They can see the trees but not the forest.
They are aware only of a partial, narrow, short-sighted so-called “workers’ interest,” yet they cannot look a little farther ahead.
They have forgotten the immense damage that the “left”-deviationist, adventurist industrial policy and workers’ movement line implemented during the years 1931–1934 once inflicted upon the working class, the laboring people, and the revolutionary government.
They have made no effort whatsoever to study the sound industrial policies and guidelines for the workers’ movement issued repeatedly by the CPC Central Committee over the eleven years since 1937.
Instead, they stubbornly resist the Party’s line.
For long periods of time, many local Party leadership organs have not even formally discussed or publicly explained and interpreted the Central Committee’s line, leaving comrades engaged in workers’ movement work completely uninformed about it—such has been their degree of insensitivity and indifference.
This situation can no longer be allowed to continue.
All local Party leadership organs must seriously discuss the Central Committee’s line and the entire body of industrial policy and workers’ movement guidelines, resolutely correct all “left”-deviationist, adventurist ideas, policies, and practices that harm the working class, the laboring people, and the revolutionary government, and swiftly set industrial construction and the workers’ movement back on the right track.
Only in this way can we pool all our strength to overthrow imperialism and the reactionary rule of the Kuomintang, liberate the Chinese nation and the Chinese people, and establish a new-democratic China.


Printed from Mao Zedong’s manuscript.
Note [1]: This is a passage added by Mao Zedong while reviewing a Xinhua News Agency editorial draft commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1923 Peking-Hankow Railway Workers’ General Strike (the “February 7th” Strike). Mao also changed the original title of the editorial, “The Direction of the Workers’ Movement in the Liberated Areas,” to “Uphold the Correct Line of the Workers’ Movement and Oppose ‘Left’ Deviationism and Adventurism.” In the section discussing the proper attitude workers should adopt toward their work, he further added: “Other labor conditions likewise must not be set too high; they must not exceed the limits permitted by economic conditions, nor violate the general principle of developing production, revitalizing the economy, balancing public and private interests, and securing mutual benefit for both labor and capital.”
This editorial was published in the People’s Daily on February 8, 1948.