(June 12, 1958)
To Comrade Chen Boda: When studying Marxism, we should also adopt the approach of these two young men—namely, going to the library in order to solve pressing problems. Lenin, in order to criticize the theism that had arisen within the Russian Party after the failure of the 1905 Revolution (represented by Lunacharsky and Pyatnitsky), systematically studied the history of philosophy and wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a work that required immense effort.
Mao Zedong
June 12th
[1)


This note was written on June 11, 1958, in the Guangming Daily. On that day, the second page of the newspaper, under the broad headline “The East Wind Grows Strong while the West Wind Fades; True Heroes Are Seen Today,” carried two articles: “Ma Guorong Eradicates Salmonella” and “Sun Shougang Produces Sand Cement Superior in Quality to That of Britain.” The article “Ma Guorong Eradicates Salmonella” described how Ma Guorong, a young technician at the Renli Food Factory in Tianjin who had only attended university for two years, tackled the problem of salmonella in egg products by first immersing himself in study. He spent his spare time visiting bookstores and libraries, seeking out books on bacteriology, microbiology, and medicine, and combined theoretical reading with practical research. After more than a year of diligent study and 322 experiments, he developed the “vacuum nitrogen-filling method,” which successfully eliminated salmonella from egg products—solving a long-standing issue in the international market. The other article, “Sun Shougang Produces Sand Cement Superior in Quality to That of Britain,” recounted the story of Sun Shougang, a 21-year-old laboratory technician at the Repair and Testing Institute of the Tianjin Municipal Power Supply Bureau, who, undaunted by difficulties, spent over four years consulting libraries and technical documents and conducting numerous trials before successfully producing a high-quality sand cement whose performance surpassed that of similar products from Britain and Japan.
[2)
Chen Boda was then Director of the Political Research Office of the CPC Central Committee and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Red Flag.