Mao Zedong (hereafter referred to as Mao): We celebrate the festival of your ethnic group. We are very happy that you are spending the Tibetan New Year in Beijing, and the people of the whole country are happy too. We Han people also have two New Years: one is the lunar New Year, a custom preserved over a long period in history, and even now the vast majority of people still observe the lunar New Year. The other is the solar New Year.
Dalai Lama (hereafter referred to as Dalai): This year we have spent two New Years in the interior.
Panchen Erdeni (hereafter referred to as Panchen): We have already visited the Northeast, and I will soon go to visit East China. During the visit to the Northeast, we saw many heavy industry construction projects and felt that our socialist industrialization will be built very quickly, which filled us with boundless joy.
Mao: Our country is a backward country, with very underdeveloped industry. There are many machines we still cannot manufacture ourselves, and we do not have large quantities of steel. But this does not matter; we can build. In another fifty years, we can build a country that is presentable. Our country was often bullied in the past, and the most despicable bully was U.S. imperialism. Our country has always had a vast territory and abundant resources, a large population, and favorable natural conditions and climate. It was only because some bad people led here in the past, and politics were not good, that we fell behind the generally advanced countries by over a hundred years in all respects.