Editor's note from Hongqi Magazine:  This is another investigative report from Shanghai,
now published for reference. What is the current situation of engineering and technical
personnel in factories across major, medium, and small industrial cities nationwide? What is
the status of the educational revolution in engineering and science universities and
secondary schools? We hope that revolutionary committees in various regions will organise
some people to conduct typical investigations and report to the Central Committee. This
magazine will select and publish the highlights. Here, we raise a question: attention should
be paid to re-educating the large number of graduates from higher and secondary schools
who have already started working or are currently working, so that they can integrate with
the workers and peasants. Among them, there must be those who have integrated well and
made inventions and innovations, and they should be reported on to serve as
encouragement. Those who are truly irredeemable—the so-called die-hard capitalist roaders
and bourgeois technical authorities who have aroused great public anger and must be
overthrown—are only a tiny minority. Even for these individuals, we must provide an outlet.
A policy that offers no outlet is not the policy of the proletariat. The aforementioned policies
should apply equally to both new and old intellectuals in the humanities and sciences.
Comrade Yao Wenyuan:
This piece is still useful and can be published. Please bring up the question of whether the
commentary I wrote is appropriate at the meeting.
Mao Zedong
2 September

[1] This is another investigative report submitted by the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee
following the report titled ‘The Growth of Shanghai Workers and Technical Personnel in
Struggle’ submitted on 29 August 1968. The report states that when the Shanghai
Mechanical Engineering College, formerly known as the Shanghai Machine Manufacturing
School, was established, the first batch of over 2,000 students were all selected from
workers, farmers, and a portion of rural grassroots cadres. These students, selected from
workers and farmers with practical experience, had clear learning objectives, high class



consciousness, and applied their knowledge to practice, thereby challenging the old
educational system, curriculum content, and teaching methods. Recently, some engineering
and technical personnel from the Shanghai Machine Tool Factory who graduated from this
school in the past, along with workers and faculty and students from the school's affiliated
factory, summarised the positive and negative experiences since the school's establishment
and put forward some suggestions for the educational revolution at science and technology
universities. 1. For science and engineering universities to follow the path of the Shanghai
Machine Tool Factory, they must resolve the issue of which class will hold leadership power.
2. The academic system of science and engineering universities should be two to three
years. 3. Science and engineering universities should also take on the task of providing good
part-time technical education. 4. A proletarian teaching staff must be established. The future
teaching staff should adopt a three-pronged approach combining workers with high
proletarian political consciousness and practical experience, peasant-worker students, and
revolutionary intellectuals. A large number of workers and technical personnel in society
who have made inventions and innovations in practice should be systematically and
regularly invited to give lectures in schools. Students also have practical experience and can
take to the podium to exchange ideas with one another. Existing teachers should be sent in
phases to the workers and peasants to follow the path of combining with the workers and
peasants. This investigative report and Mao Zedong's editorial note for the Red Flag
magazine were both published in the third issue of the Red Flag magazine on 10 September
1968.