Interjections at a Meeting During the Qingdao Conference
(July 18, 1957)

Source: _Wansui_ (n.d. 3), p. 194.

See text July 17, 1957, source note.

Strange! [They are] not afraid of imperialism, but they are afraid of bourgeois
ideology.
In Beijing, 1,500 came out of the fight. Throughout the nation [we’ve] got to
get ten Beijings from the fighting.¹ All big trees have [big] roots. Liu-Sha-He is a
son of a big landlord.² This is a new-style purging of counterrevolutionaries. We
must do a careful job of taking care of the strategy for the struggle with the [special]
district secretaries and the _xian_ secretaries.³ Big-character posters are good things.
Why aren’t we afraid of big-character posters? Because we are always [in] the

JULY – SEPTEMBER 1957 / 645

majority. The factories must absolutely not hinder production. The more rotten the
place is, the greater the collapse, the better the place is to get things done. The
provinces must send experienced cadres down [to those places where they must]
toughen their scalps.4 [Let there be] great contending and great blooming for two
weeks.5 [We’ll] just listen and not say a word.
[We’ll] have two rectifications in each five-year plan [period]; one large[-scale]
and one small.6 Don’t remove the rocks; right now we must yet rely on these rocks.7
There has been an increase in grain production every year, but [the amount of the
increase] gets smaller and smaller. Last year we used X catties that were stockpiled.8 This year we’ve got to promote [production to the tune of] X catties.
Clothing is also a major item. Now [the production] has halved; less and less. How
can that be? Wherever there are counterrevolutionaries, they must be suppressed.
Arrest them first, and then we can talk. [We] cannot be like XXX9 [we must] by
no means ever issue a self-indicting edict.10

Too many people in the handicraft-industry cooperatives are taken away from
production. In Xingdeng xian in Zhejiang [Province], of a population of 70,000,
there are 3,500 officials. That really is too much; they should reduce the number
by 3,000 and leave [only] 500. There are also too many nonproduction personnel
in the factories—they make up 30 per cent. In the Soviet Union [such personnel]
make up 25 per cent; in the United States, it is only 3 to 5 per cent. Now we have
to give some consideration [to this]; the superfluous have to be kept fed, and then,
in several years’ time, transferred over to production. The money that is saved can
be used to expand the economic enterprise.

The scope of the rectification is to be expanded. The Party, the Youth League,
the democratic parties, the people’s organizations, the federations of industry and
commerce, schools, literature and artistic circles, economic enterprise organs, and
the cooperatives11 all must undergo rectification. With the exception of a small
number of well-known personages, all the Rightists are to be sent to labor education
[and reform].

The Association of Communists should be bigger than the Communist
Party.12 Let the leading comrades at the Center go to be the presidents [of that
association].

If, among those landlords, rich peasants, and counterrevolutionaries, there are
those who have had their hats removed13 but are once more making mischief, they
should be made to wear that label once again. Let’s get ourselves a set of rules for
labor education. The death penalty should not be too lightly abolished. We must
not give the landlords, rich peasants, and counterrevolutionaries their right to vote
too prematurely. We’ll not deal with the big ones, but just deal with the small. All
these [“]passes[”] have to be checked firmly. That clique of the Monk of Tang; The
Pig is more simplistic and can be forgiven; it won’t do not to have a golden-headband chant [with which to control] the Monkey King.14

It is in conformity with people’s sentiments and in line with the principles of
heaven to oppose the Right-deviationist ideas and to oppose the Rightists and the
ultra-Rightists. The provincial and municipal [authorities] do not control the center
of the democratic parties; that should be cut in two.15


Notes

1. We are not exactly sure of what Mao meant by these figures. A tentative guess is
that he was referring to the number of “counterrevolutionary bourgeois elements” who had
been exposed in (“came out of”) the anti-Rightist campaign, and that he wanted to have the
experience repeated elsewhere throughout the nation.
2. We are unable to identify Liu-Sha-He. The characters here do not resemble a real
name, but appear to be a pseudonym.
3. The phrases _di shi_ and _xian shu_ here refer, we believe, to short forms of _di wei shuji_
(special district Party committee secretaries) and _xian wei shuji_ (xian Party committee
secretaries). We do not know exactly what Mao means in an overall sense.
4. See text Mar. 20, 1957(1), note 119; text July 8, 1957(2), note 2.
5. See text Autumn 1956, note 3.
6. See text July 8, 1957, paragraph 8.
7. On the meaning of “removing rocks,” see text Feb. 18, 1951, vol. I, note 11.
8. The term _ku cun_ (stockpiled) also has the meaning of “hold in reserve.” The original
has XX _yi_, in which _yi_ is the word for “a hundred million.” Following our custom, however,
we have opted to render all indeterminable numbers in the text as simply X in our translation.
In this case, XX merely means that two characters were changed to X in the text, but it does
not give us any clue to the exact figures used in the original. The same applies to the number
in the next sentence. The phrase there is XXX _yi_.
9. We believe that XXX here refers to Stalin.
10. See text Jan. 1957, note 38, and text Jan. 27, 1957(2), note 1.
11. See text Mar. 12, 1957, source note, and text May 15, 1957, source note and note 31.
12. We cannot tell what Mao meant by the phrase _gongchan zhuyi zhe xiehui_, which we
have translated as “the Association of Communists.”
13. See text Dec. 8, 1956, note 33, for the meaning of “hats.”
14. In the novel _Xi you ji_, when the Buddha and the Bodhisattva Guanyin subdue the
Monkey King (Sun Wukong), a golden headband is placed on his skull. This is no ordinary
ornament, but can contract in response to a chanted curse that the Monk of Tang
(Xuanzhuang) can use to control and tame the Monkey King. See text July 17, 1957, note
8. On the character Zhu Bajie in the novel, often known as “The Pig,” see text Oct. 11,
1955(2), vol. I, note 15.
15. See text Sept. 21, 1949, vol. I, note 1.