August 30, 1956

[Speech at the first session of the preparatory meeting for the Eighth National
Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.]


Today we begin the preparatory meeting for the Eighth National Congress.
The meeting will last about a fortnight and its main business is: (1) drafting
documents for the congress; (2) conducting a preliminary election of the
Central Committee; and (3) preparing speeches for the congress.

Now let me deal with a few points.

First, about the objectives and purposes of the congress. What problems is
this congress to solve and what are its objectives? In a word, it is to sum
up the experience gained since the Seventh Congress, unite the whole Party
and unite with all the forces at home and abroad that can be united in the
struggle to build a great socialist China.

About the summing-up of experience. Although we have a rich store of experience,
we should not merely juxtapose a host of facts but should sum up by grasping
the essentials, proceeding from reality and adopting a Marxist standpoint.
A summing-up in this way will stimulate our whole Party and enable us to
do our work better.

Our Party is a great, glorious and correct Party, a fact which is acknowledged
by the whole world. In the past, some foreign comrades had doubts about what
we were actually doing. Many didn't understand our policy towards the national
bourgeoisie, nor were they very clear about our rectification movement. Today
I would say more have come to understand them and most can be said to have
such an understanding. Of course, there are still some who don't. Within
the country and even inside the Party, there are some who don't understand
and who maintain that the line we have followed since the Seventh Congress
is not necessarily so correct. But the facts are there for all to see, we
have carried out two revolutions -- the bourgeois-democratic revolution to
seize state power and the proletarian socialist revolution to carry out socialist
transformation and build a socialist country. In the eleven years since the
Seventh Congress we have scored great successes, and this is acknowledged
by the whole nation and the whole world. Even the bourgeoisie abroad has
to acknowledge it. The two revolutions prove that the line of the Central
Committee since the Seventh Congress has been correct.

The October Revolution overthrew the bourgeoisie, an event without precedent
in world history. In all countries the bourgeoisie was sweeping in its
denunciation of this revolution and had never a good word for it. The bourgeoisie
in Russia was a counter-revolutionary class, it rejected state capitalism
at that time, organized slow-downs and sabotage and resorted to the gun.
The Russian proletariat had no choice but to finish it off. This infuriated
the bourgeoisie in other countries, and they became abusive. Here in China
we have been relatively moderate with our national bourgeoisie, who feel
a little more comfortable and believe there are some good points in our policy.
By prohibiting American journalists from coming to China, Eisenhower and
Dulles have now in fact admitted that it does have good points. If things
were in an awful mess here, they would have let their journalists come, knowing
that the result could only be vicious articles. What they dread most is that
the articles might include not only invective but a good word here and there,
and that would be awkward for them.

China used to be stigmatized as a "decrepit empire", "the sick man of East
Asia", a country with a backward economy and a backward culture, with no
hygiene, poor at ball games and swimming, where the women had bound feet,
the men wore pigtails and eunuchs could still be found, and where the moon
was inferior and did not shine as brightly as in foreign lands. In short,
there was much that was bad in China. But after six years' work of transformation
we have changed the face of China. No one can deny our achievements.

Our Party is the core leading our revolutionary cause forward. In summing
up experience the congress must first and foremost aim at achieving greater
unity throughout the Party. Up to June Party membership stood at 10,730,000.
A great deal of work must be done to educate, enlighten and unite these more
than ten million Party members, so that they can play their role as the core
among the people better. By itself the Party is not enough, it is only the
core and needs a mass following. In all fields, including industry, agriculture,
commerce, culture and education, 90 per cent of the work is done by non-Party
people and not by Party members. Therefore, we must strive hard to unite
with the masses, unite and work with all those that can be united. In our
past efforts to achieve unity inside the Party and with people outside the
Party there were many defects. During and after the congress we must conduct
propaganda and carry on education so that our work in this respect will be
considerably improved.

Internationally, we must unite with all the forces in the world that can
be united, first of all with the Soviet Union, the fraternal Parties, the
fraternal countries and their people, and also with all the peace-loving
countries and people, and we must enlist the support of all useful forces.
Delegates of Communist Parties from over fifty countries will attend our
congress, and this is very good. In the past we had not seized state power
or won victory in the two revolutions and had no success to speak of in
construction. It is quite different now. We are held in fairly high esteem
by our foreign comrades.

What is our objective in uniting with all the forces that can be united,
inside and outside the Party and at home and abroad? It is to build a great
socialist country. A country like ours may and ought to be described as "great".
Our Party is a great Party, our people a great people, our revolution a great
revolution, and our construction is great, too. Only one country on this
globe has a population of 600 million, and that is China. In the past there
were reasons for others to look down upon us. For we had little to contribute,
steel output registered only several hundred thousand tons a year, and even
that was in the hands of the Japanese. Under the despotic rule of Chiang
Kai-shek's Kuomintang, which lasted twenty-two years, steel output was only
some tens of thousands of tons a year. We still don't have much steel, but
a promising start has been made. Output this year will be over four million
tons, it will hit the five million mark next year, will exceed ten million
tons after the Second Five-Year Plan and is likely to top twenty million
after the Third. We must work hard to reach this target. There are about
a hundred countries in the world, but only a few produce over twenty million
tons of steel a year. Therefore, once built up, China will be a great socialist
country and will radically transform the situation in which for over a century
it was backward, despised and wretched. Moreover, it will be able to catch
up with the most powerful capitalist country in the world, the United States.
The United States has a population of only 170 million, and as we have a
population several times larger, are similarly rich in resources and are
favoured with more or less the same kind of climate, it is possible for us
to catch up with the United States. Oughtn't we catch up? Definitely yes.
What are your 600 million people doing? Dozing? Which is right, dozing or
working? If working is the answer, why can't you with your 600 million people
produce 200 or 300 million tons of steel when they with their population
of 170 million can produce 100 million tons? If you fail to catch up, you
cannot justify yourselves and you will not be so glorious or great. The United
States has a history of only one hundred and eighty years, and sixty years
ago it too produced four million tons of steel, so we are sixty years behind.
Given fifty or sixty years, we certainly ought to overtake the United States.
This is an obligation. You have such a big population, such a vast territory
and such rich resources, and what is more, you are said to be building socialism,
which is supposed to be superior; if after working at it for fifty or sixty
years you are still unable to overtake the United States, what a sorry figure
you will cut! You should be read off the face of the earth. Therefore, to
overtake the United States is not only possible, but absolutely necessary
and obligatory. If we don't, the Chinese nation will be letting the nations
of the world down and we will not be making much of a contribution to mankind.

Second, about carrying forward the Party's traditions. The congress should
carry forward our Party's fine traditions with respect to ideology and style
of work. It should effectively combat subjectivism and sectarianism and oppose
bureaucracy as well. I won't go into bureaucracy today and will deal only
with subjectivism and sectarianism. After being overcome, subjectivism and
sectarianism crop up again and have to be overcome again.

By making mistakes, we mean making subjectivist mistakes, following a wrong
way of thinking. The many articles we've come across criticizing Stalin's
mistakes say little or nothing on this score. Why did Stalin make mistakes?
Because on a number of issues his subjective thinking failed to correspond
with objective reality. Such cases still happen frequently in our work today.
Subjectivism means proceeding not from objective reality and from what is
actually possible, but from subjective wishes. What is to be set forth and
dealt with in our congress documents should as far as possible conform to
approximate Chinese realities. At the same time, in the light of our experience,
we should criticize views running counter to the realities, criticize and
combat subjectivism. This was the task we set ourselves years ago. At present,
we are combating subjectivism as found in the socialist revolution and socialist
construction. In the course of the democratic revolution we were plagued
by subjectivism for a long time and we paid dearly for it, losing practically
all our base areas and over 90 per cent of our revolutionary forces, and
it was only then that we began to come to our senses. The problem was not
straightened out until the rectification movement in Yenan, which laid stress
on investigation and study and a realistic approach. The universal truth
of Marxism must be integrated with the concrete practice of the Chinese
revolution, or else we will get nowhere. In other words, theory must be
integrated with practice. Integration of theory with practice is one of the
fundamental principles of Marxism. According to dialectical materialism,
thought must reflect objective reality and must be tested and verified in
objective practice before it can be taken as truth, otherwise it cannot.
Though we have done well in the last few years, subjectivism is evident
everywhere. There will be subjectivism in the future, just as there is today.
Subjectivism will always be there, ten thousand years and even a hundred
million years from now, and it will be so as long as humanity does not perish.
Where there is subjectivism, there are mistakes.

Then there is another phenomenon called sectarianism. A locality has its
own over-all interest, a nation has another and the earth yet another. Right
now I won't go into matters outside our planet, for the travel routes beyond
the earth have not yet been opened. If human beings should be discovered
on Mars or Venus, we would then discuss the matter of uniting with them and
forming a united front. For the time being, we will confine ourselves to
the question of unity in the Party, in the country and in the world. Our
principle is to unite with all those who are capable of doing some good for
world peace and the cause of human progress, whether they are foreign Communists
or foreign non-Party people. First of all, we should unite with the scores
of Communist Parties and with the Soviet Union. As some mistakes have occurred
in the Soviet Union and there is so much talk and gossip about them, it might
seem that these mistakes were terrible. It is wrong to take this view. No
nation can be free from mistakes, and since the Soviet Union was the first
socialist country in the world and went through so much for so long, it was
impossible for it not to make mistakes. Then how should we weigh the Soviet
Union's mistakes, for instance those of Stalin? They are of a partial and
transitory nature. Although it has come to our ears that certain things have
been going on for twenty years, still they are transitory and partial and
can be set right. In the Soviet Union the main trend, the principal aspect,
the major part, has been correct. Russia gave birth to Leninism and through
the October Revolution became the first socialist country. It built socialism,
defeated fascism and became a powerful industrial country. There are a lot
of things we can learn from the Soviet Union. Naturally, we should learn
from its advanced and not its backward experience. The slogan we have advocated
all along is to draw on the advanced Soviet experience. Who told you to pick
up its backward experience? Some people are so undiscriminating that they
say a Russian fart is fragrant. That too is subjectivism. The Russians themselves
say it stinks. Therefore, we should be analytical. As we have indicated
elsewhere, the assessment of Stalin should be 70 per cent for achievements
and 30 per cent for mistakes. In the case of the Soviet Union what is good
and useful makes up the essential and larger part and what is wrong only
a small part. We too have things that are not good, and far from letting
other countries pick them up, we should dump them. In a way, bad things are
also some kind of experience and can serve a useful purpose. We have had
people like Chen Tu-hsiu, Li Li-san, Wang Ming, Chang Kuo-tao, Kao Kang and
Jao Shu-shih, who have served as our teachers. In addition, we have other
teachers. Within the country the best among them has been Chiang Kai-shek.
Those whom we couldn't convince were convinced right away when Chiang Kai-shek
came along to give them a lesson. How did Chiang Kai-shek teach his lessons?
He taught with machine-guns, cannon and planes. Imperialism is another teacher
that has given our 600 million people an education. For over a century we
were oppressed by several imperialist powers, and this has been an education.
Therefore, bad things can serve an educational purpose and open our eyes.

As for the fight against sectarianism, one thing in particular should be
pointed out, that is, you should unite with those who have waged struggles
against you. They came to blows with you, knocked you down, made you suffer
and lose face and conferred the "official honour" of opportunist on you,
although you were not that bad. If the blow was justified, then it served
you right. If you were an opportunist, why shouldn't the blow have been aimed
at you? What I am talking about here is the unjustified blows and struggles.
Once those who dealt such blows change their attitude and admit that they
did wrong in attacking you and that it was not right to proclaim you "king"
of the realm of opportunism, then let the matter end there. If a few don't
admit they were wrong, can't you wait? You can, I suppose. By unity we mean
uniting with those who have differences with you, who look down on you or
show little respect for you, who have had a bone to pick with you or waged
struggles against you and at whose hands you have suffered. As for those
who see eye to eye with you, you are already united with them, so the question
of unity doesn't arise. The trouble here is with those who have yet to be
united. We mean those who have opinions differing from yours or who have
serious shortcomings. For instance, within our Party at present there are
many who have joined the Party only organizationally and not ideologically.
They may not have come to blows or crossed swords with you, but as they have
not joined the Party ideologically, what they do is inevitably not so
satisfactory or is marred by faults, and they may even do some bad things.
With regard to such people, we must unite with them and educate and help
them. I said before that in dealing with all those who have shortcomings
or have made mistakes, we must not only observe whether they are going to
mend their ways but should help them correct their mistakes. In other words,
we must first observe, and second give help. Merely to observe means to stand
by and see how they behave. If they do well, that's fine, and if they don't,
let them suffer. This is a passive attitude, not a positive one. Marxists
should adopt a positive attitude, that is, help as well as observe.

Third, about the election of the Central Committee. Comrade Teng Hsiao-ping
mentioned just now that the Eighth Central Committee will have 150 to 170
members. This is slightly more than twice the size of the Seventh Central
Committee with its seventy-seven members and is probably quite appropriate.
It will probably be better not to expand the Central Committee further for
several years, say, five years. Many capable people doing very useful work
today were trained during the War of Resistance Against Japan, and they are
known as cadres of the " '38 type". They are the mainstay of our work today,
and we cannot do without them. But they are numerous, and if arrangements
were to be made for them, the number of Central Committee members would have
to rise to several hundred. So this time we will not make any such arrangements.
We leave to the comrades here to consider whether the figure of 150 to 170
proposed by the Central Committee is appropriate, and if not, what size would
be proper.

It should be affirmed that members of the present Central Committee have
done good work and lived up to the trust placed in them by the Seventh Congress.
In the past eleven years they have correctly led the Chinese democratic
revolution and the socialist revolution and socialist construction without
committing grave errors and have waged struggles against opportunism of all
descriptions and against what is erroneous, thus overcoming all factors
unfavourable to the revolution and construction. They have done well, including
some of those comrades who made mistakes before. Here I am speaking of the
Central Committee as a whole. As for certain comrades, this assessment does
not hold true. Especially for Wang Ming. At the Seventh Congress, in order
to get by, he submitted a written statement acknowledging that the line of
the Central Committee was correct, accepting its political report to the
Seventh Congress and indicating his willingness to abide by its decisions.
But when I had a talk with him some time later, he made a right about face,
forgetting what he had written. Then he thought it over and said the next
day that he had written something in which he did own up to his mistakes.
I told him that, even so, if he wanted to deny his mistakes now, he could
withdraw that statement. But he didn't. Later at the Second Plenary Session
we expressed the hope that he would speak on his mistakes, but instead he
digressed, lavishing praises upon us. We told him he could cut that out and
speak on the mistakes he, Wang Ming, had made, but he wouldn't hear of it.
He promised to write a self-criticism after the session. But later he said
that he had been taken ill and was unable to do mental work, and that as
soon as he started writing his illness returned. Maybe he was cooking all
this up, it's hard to say. He has been feeling unwell and will not be able
to attend the congress. Shall we elect him? And Comrade Li Li-san too? More
comrades are ready to forgive Li Li-san, whereas there are fewer ready to
forgive Wang Ming. As Comrade Teng Hsiao-ping stated, if we elect them the
significance will be similar to their election at the Seventh Congress. At
that congress, many delegates were unwilling to elect them (not only Wang
Ming, but quite a few other comrades as well). We said at the time that we
would make a mistake if we adopted such a policy. Why would we have made
a mistake if we had not elected those who had erred? Because it would have
meant that we were following their example. Their procedure was to reject
anyone once labelled by them as an opportunist, regardless of whether or
not he had actually made mistakes. If we had followed this procedure, we
would have been following their line, the Wang Ming line or the Li Li-san
line. We would do nothing of the kind, under no circumstances would we follow
the Wang Ming or the Li Li-san line. The inner-Party relations they cultivated
were such that they rejected without exception all those who had made mistakes
and those who had waged struggles against them or denounced them as opportunists.
They styled themselves 100 per cent Bolsheviks, only to be shown later to
be 100 per cent opportunists. On the other hand, it is those of us once labelled
by them as "opportunists" who have some grasp of Marxism.

The heart of the matter here is that they are not just a few isolated individuals
but represent a substantial part of the petty bourgeoisie. China is a country
with a huge petty bourgeoisie. A considerable part of the petty bourgeoisie
vacillates. It is plain to all that the well-to-do middle peasants, for instance,
invariably vacillate and do not stand firm in any revolution, going wild
when elated and burying their heads in dejection when pessimistic. Most of
the time their eyes are glued on that precious bit of property they possess,
which is no more than one or two draught animals, a cart and a dozen mou
of land. Swayed by considerations of loss and gain, they are most anxious
not to lose these possessions. They are different from the poor peasants.
The poor peasants account for 50 per cent of the rural population in northern
China and 70 per cent in the south. In terms of class composition, our Party
consists chiefly of workers and poor peasants, namely, the proletariat and
the semi-proletariat. The semi-proletariat is also petty bourgeois, but they
are much more steadfast than the middle peasants. Our Party has also admitted
a number of intellectuals into its ranks, and of our more than ten million
members, intellectuals of the higher, middle and lower levels total approximately
one million. It would not be proper to say that they represent imperialism
or that they represent the landlord class, the bureaucrat-capitalist class
or the national bourgeoisie; it would be more appropriate to classify them
as petty bourgeois. Which part of the petty bourgeoisie do they chiefly
represent? That part of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie with more means
of production, the well-to-do middle peasants for instance. The intellectuals
among our Party members "fear dragons ahead and tigers behind", they constantly
waver and are afflicted with a fair amount of subjectivism and no small measure
of sectarianism. What does our election of these two persons representing
the Wang Ming and Li Li-san lines signify? It signifies that we treat those
who have made ideological mistakes differently from those who are
counter-revolutionaries and splittists (people like Chen Tu-hsiu, Chang Kuo-tao,
Kao Kang and Jao Shu-shih). Wang Ming and Li Li-san went about their subjectivism
and sectarianism in an open way and with a great fanfare, trying to overwhelm
people with their political programmes. Wang Ming had his own political programme
and so did Li Li-san. Of course, Chen Tu-hsiu had one of his own too, but
he went the Trotskyite way, worked for a split and carried on activities
against the Party from the outside. Chang Kuo-tao was engaged in conspiracy
and splittism and eventually went over to the Kuomintang. Therefore the question
of Wang Ming and Li Li-san is not just a question of two individuals, what
is important here is that there are underlying social causes. One of their
manifestations in our Party is that quite a number of members tend to vacillate
at critical junctures. These vacillating elements are opportunistic. That
is to say, such people do one thing if they can get something out of it and
switch to another if that benefits them. They have no definite principles,
no definite rules of conduct and no definite orientation, going this way
today and that tomorrow. Wang Ming, for instance, is just like that. First
he was "Left" in the extreme and later he became Right in the extreme.

At the Seventh Congress, we convinced many comrades and had Wang Ming and
Li Li-san elected. In the eleven years since, have we suffered any loss in
consequence? No, none at all. We did not fail in our revolution, nor was
our victory delayed by a few months just because we had elected Wang Ming
and Li Li-san.

Does their election mean encouragement for people who have made mistakes?
"Now that people who have made mistakes are on the Central Committee, let
us all make mistakes, then we too will have a chance of being elected!" Will
this happen? No, it won't. Look, not one of our seventy or so Central Committee
members has gone out of his way to make a few mistakes in order to get reelected.
As for those who are not Central Committee members, whether they joined the
revolution before, during or after the year 1938, will they follow the example
of Wang Ming and Li Li-san and come up with another two lines -- to make
a total of four -- just to get themselves elected to the Central Committee?
No, they won't, nobody will do that. On the contrary, drawing lessons from
their mistakes, our comrades will become more prudent.

There is another point. In the past one heard such talk as "better join the
revolution late than early, or better still, don't join the revolution at
all". Now, will the election of Wang Ming and Li Li-san create the impression
in the Party that it is better to be wrong than right, better to make big
mistakes than small ones? If Wang Ming and Li Li-san who have made mistakes
on the Party line are now to be elected to the Central Committee, comrades
who have proved themselves correct or have made only small mistakes will
have to yield two seats to them. Isn't this arrangement the most unfair thing
in the world? Judged in that light, it is indeed unfair. You see, those who
have proved themselves correct or have made only small mistakes have to make
room for those who have made big ones. It is obviously unfair, there is no
fairness whatsoever in it. If a comparison is made this way, it must be conceded
that it is better to be wrong than right, better to make big mistakes than
small ones. But judged from another angle, the case is different. Their mistakes
on the Party line are known all over the country and throughout the world,
and the fact that they are well known is precisely the reason for electing
them. What can you do about it? They are well known, but you who have made
no mistakes or have made only small ones don't have as big a reputation as
theirs. In a country like ours with its very large petty bourgeoisie they
are standards. If we elect them, many people will say, "The Communist Party
continues to be patient with them and is willing to give up two seats to
them in the hope that they will mend their ways." Whether they will or not
is another matter, which is inconsequential, involving as it does only the
two of them. The point is that in our society the petty bourgeoisie is vast
in number, that in our Party there are many vacillating elements of
petty-bourgeois origin and that among the intellectuals there are many such
vacillating elements; they all want to see what will happen to these test
cases. When they see these two standards still there, they will feel comfortable,
they will sleep well and be pleased. If you haul down the two standards,
they may panic. Therefore, it is not a question of whether Wang Ming and
Li Li-san will mend their ways, that does not matter very much. What matters
is that the millions of Party members of petty-bourgeois origin who are prone
to vacillate, and the intellectuals in particular, are watching the kind
of attitude we take towards Wang Ming and Li Li-san. This is like our treatment
of the rich peasants in the agrarian reform; when we left the rich peasants
untouched, the middle peasants were at ease. If we adopt the same attitude
towards these two men at the Eighth Congress as we did at the Seventh, our
Party will have something to gain, to derive benefit from, that is, the task
of remoulding the masses of the petty bourgeoisie throughout the country
will be easier. This will also have an influence in the world. Few countries,
or one can say none, adopt the attitude we do towards persons who have made
mistakes.

The preparatory meeting for the congress will last only about a fortnight,
counting from today, but if arrangements are made properly, it is entirely
possible to do a good job of the preparations. We are certain that the congress
will be a success and that with their political level the delegates will
assure its success. But all of us must be conscientious and do our very best.


Transcription by the Maoist Documentation Project.