6 Speech at the Lushan Conference
23 July 1959
Now that you have said so much, let me say something
will you? I have taken sleeping-pills three times, but I can't get
to sleep.
These are the ideas I want to talk about. I have read the
comrades’ reports, speeches and documents, and talked to a
certain number of them. I feel they have two tendencies and I
want to say a few words about them here. One is the tendency
to be touchy — with these people it’s very much a case of: ‘If
you touch him he jumps.’ Wu Chih-hui used to say that Sun
Fo jumped if anyone touched him.* So some people feel the
pressure; that is, they don’t want others to say bad things about
them. They don’t want to hear bad things, but only good things. I
advise these comrades to listen. There are three kinds of words,
and the mouth has two functions. A person has only one mouth
and its duty is firstly, to eat, and secondly, to speak. Ears are for
listening with. If someone wants to talk, what can you do about
it? The trouble with some comrades is that they don’t like listening to bad words. But good words and bad words are all words,
and they should listen to both kinds. There are three kinds of
words: one is correct, the second is basically correct, or not too
correct and the third is basically incorrect, or just plain incorrect. The two extremes are opposites: correct and incorrect are
opposites.
We are under combined attack from within and outside the
Party. The rightists say: Why was Ch'in Shih Huang overthrown? Because he built the Great Wall. Now that we have
built the T’ien An Men? we shall collapse; this is what the