Comments on and Revisions to the Article "The Crux of 'Self-Cultivation' Is Its Betrayal of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat"

In China, there is the "Li Yun: Da Tong Pian" [Book of Rites: The Great Unity], [1] Tao Qian's "Peach Blossom Spring," [2] and Kang Youwei's "Book of Great Unity." [3] In foreign countries, there are the voluminous works of French and British utopian socialists—all are of the same ilk.

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According to the author's view, in communist society everything is beautiful, without a trace of darkness, without any contradictions; everything is perfect, with no opposites. Society henceforth ceases to develop; not only does its quality remain forever unchanged, but even its quantity seems to remain forever unchanged. Social development comes to an end, remaining forever the same. Here the author has cast aside a fundamental law of Marxism—that all things, every human society, are driven forward in development by the struggle of opposites, by contradictions. Here the author preaches metaphysics and discards the great dialectical materialism and historical materialism.

[1] "Li Yun" is a chapter in the "Book of Rites," a collection of Confucian thought and ritual works from the Warring States period to the early Western Han dynasty. The "Great Unity" it describes refers to an ideal society where "the world is for the common good."

[2] Tao Qian, also known as Tao Yuanming, was a poet of the Eastern Jin dynasty. His prose piece "Peach Blossom Spring" describes an isolated "land of idyllic beauty" free from turmoil.

[3] Kang Youwei was a modern Chinese politician, thinker, and leader of the bourgeois reformist faction. His "Book of Great Unity" combines the "Great Unity" concept from "Li Yun" with the "Three Ages" theory of the Confucian Gongyang school, putting forward his own "Great Unity" thought, asserting that "in the age of Great Unity, the world is for the common good, there are no classes, and all are equal."

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Comments on Zhang Xiangshan's [1] Request for Instructions Report [2] on the Translation of a Quotation in "On Contradiction"

(May 4, 1967)

How to handle this—please, Comrades Kang, [3] Wang, and Guan, deliberate and decide.

Mao Zedong
May 4

[1] Zhang Xiangshan was then Secretary-General of the International Liaison Department of the CPC Central Committee.

[2] On April 24, 1967, Zhang Xiangshan submitted a report to Wang Li and Guan Feng, members of the Cultural Revolution Group of the CPC Central Committee, stating: In Chairman Mao's "On Contradiction," a passage by Engels is quoted: "One of the principal foundations of higher mathematics is contradiction..." This passage was not quoted in full, hence the Chairman used ellipsis marks. When our original English translation was published in Britain, it was translated according to the Chairman's quotation. However, when the re-translated edition was published in Beijing this time, the British side considered this problematic, and the translator completed the passage. Thus, if the Chinese and English texts are read side by side, discrepancies will be found. To avoid this problem, we suggest translating according to the text as quoted by the Chairman, without completing it. But Adler, an expert from the Foreign Languages Publishing and Distribution Bureau, wrote to express disagreement, arguing that such handling distorts Engels' original meaning, and stated that Engels' passage originally referred to the particularity of contradiction, not the universality of contradiction. Adler's understanding may be correct. The problem is that the Chairman quoted this passage to illustrate the universality of contradiction; therefore, even if quoted in full, it still would not resolve the issue raised by Adler. How to handle this matter, we request your instructions. In the later published English re-translated edition, the passage was translated according to the full text of Engels' words. If translated into Chinese accordingly, it should read: "We have already mentioned that one of the principal foundations of higher mathematics is this contradiction:

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Comments on Zhang Xiangshan's Request for Instructions Report on the Translation of a Quotation in "On Contradiction"

that under certain conditions a straight line and a curve should be one and the same. Higher mathematics has yet another contradiction: that lines which intersect before our eyes, once they are five or six centimeters from the point of intersection, should be regarded as parallel lines that will never intersect even if extended infinitely. Yet, by employing these and other even sharper contradictions, higher mathematics achieves results that are not only correct but utterly unattainable by elementary mathematics." (Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 3, People's Publishing House, 1995 edition, p. 463)

[3] Kang refers to Kang Sheng, then a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and advisor to the Central Cultural Revolution Group.

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