Comrades Kang [3], Wang, and Guan will decide how to deal with this matter.
Mao Zedong
May 4

[1] Zhang Xiangshan, then Secretary-General of the International Liaison Department of the
CPC Central Committee.
[2] Zhang Xiangshan wrote a report to Wang Li and Guan Feng, members of the Cultural
Revolution Group of the CPC Central Committee, on April 24, 1967, saying that Chairman
Mao quoted a passage from Engels in his On Contradiction: "One of the main foundations of
higher education is contradiction..." The passage was not quoted in full, so Chairman Mao
used abridgement marks. When our original English translation was published in the UK, it
was translated according to the Chairman's quotation. However, when the second
translation was published in Beijing, the British side thought this was problematic, so the
translator supplemented it. Therefore, if you read the Chinese and English versions side by
side, you will find that the Chinese and English versions do not match. To avoid this problem,
we suggest that the translation should be based on the Chairman's quotation without
supplementing it. However, Adler, an expert from the Foreign Languages Publishing
Administration, wrote a letter expressing his disagreement, believing that this treatment
distorted Engels' original intention and said that Engels's original words referred to the
particularity of contradictions, not the universality of contradictions. Adler's understanding
may be correct. The problem is that the Chairman quoted this passage to illustrate the
universality of contradictions. Therefore, even if the full quotation were used, it would still
not solve the problem Adler raised. Please advise on how this should be handled. In the later
English translation, Engels's words were translated in their entirety. If translated into Chinese
accordingly, it should read: "We have already mentioned that one of the main foundations of
higher mathematics is this contradiction: under certain conditions, a straight line and a curve
should be the same thing. Higher mathematics also has another contradiction: lines that
intersect before our eyes should be considered parallel if they are only five or six
centimeters away from their point of intersection, and they would not intersect even if
extended infinitely. However, higher mathematics exploits these and other even more acute
contradictions to achieve results that are not only correct but also completely unattainable
by elementary mathematics." (Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume 3, People's
Publishing House, 1995 edition, page 463)