What news? (Zhou Enlai: Prepare to convey the Chairman’s last speech tonight and hold a
large group meeting.)
Why do we need to convey this? (Zhou Enlai: If we don’t convey the Chairman’s words, they
will say we are blocking it.)
No, it depends on whether what I said is consistent with the facts. (Zhou Enlai: They are
consistent.) (Kang Sheng20: Ask them to read "Study and Current Affairs")
Four questions, and a document. At a party congress, I gave a report, talking about the main
contradiction and the secondary contradiction. The contradiction within the party was
reduced to a secondary contradiction. After that, I talked about the national united front. I
sent it to Liu Shaoqi, Peng Zhen21 and others who disagreed. I said Chiang Kai-shek was
fighting against Japan. In the past, they did not fight against Japan and did not mobilize the
masses. (Li Xuefeng22: At the Soviet Party Congress, a student named Yang Cheng said,
"Resist Japan, resist Japan, democracy, democracy.") (Kang Sheng: It was the December
meeting.) (Cheng Shiqing23: We found that one of the three articles that the Chairman has
not published is "A Letter to the Soldiers on the Front.") I'm afraid that's not right. (Cheng

views on foreign work, saying that "peace should be made with imperialism, with revisionism, with India and
the reactionaries of various countries, and with less support for the national liberation movement", that is,
"three harmony and one less". He was denounced as a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, but was
rehabilitated with 12 other veterans on Mao’s recommendation in the preparations for the Tenth Congress and
was re-elected to the Central Committee.
20 Kang Sheng (1898-1975) joined the CCP in the early 1920s.  He supported Li Lisan and then Wang Ming, but
transferred his support to Mao Zedong, and was a head of the Party’s internal security.  He supported Mao’s
fight against revisionism but after his death, was posthumously expelled from the Party by the revisionists in
1980.
21 Peng Zhen (1902-1997) joined the CCP in 1923 and was imprisoned by the Guomindang between 1929 and
1935. He was a member of the Central Committee from 1944, and after Liberation served as Mayor of Beijing
from 1951-1966.  He opposed Mao’s line on literature and art, and sided with Liu Shaoqi at the start of the
Cultural Revolution. He was subject to mass criticism, but was rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping and restored to
the CCP’s Political Bureau.
22 Li Xuefeng (1907-2003) joined the CCP in 1933 and held a number of organisational leading positions. In
1966 he replaced Peng Zhen as secretary of the Beijing Party Committee but was criticised for sending work
teams into the universities. In 1971, he supported Chen Boda during the Second Plenary Session of the Ninth
Central Committee and was judged to be a supporter of Lin Biao’s conspiracy to assassinate Mao Zedong.
Despite this, he retained his Party membership and was rehabilitated by the revisionists in 1982.
23 Cheng Shiqing (1918-2008) joined the CCP in 1931. He had a career in the military, and in 1955 he was
awarded the rank of Major General of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. He took part in the CCP’s Ninth
National Congress and was elected to the Ninth Central Committee. He was accused of being part of Lin Biao’s
conspiracy and was held for examination in 1972 and was subsequently jailed from 1978-1982. Following his
release, he was dismissed from all posts inside and outside the Party.



Shiqing: It was published in the newspaper.) (Chen Boda24: All unity, no struggle. There is
also all struggle, no unity... "Rural Investigation Preface" and "On Policy" are written in the
two articles.) Is this "On Policy" there? (Chen Boda: Yes.) In summary, the mistakes we have
made over and over again in the past few decades are to unite everything and deny struggle;
to struggle everything and then unite again. For example, when Li Weihan25 went to Hunan,
they agreed to lock up the peasants in the prison. Xiangxiang was better. One Li Weihan, one
Xia Xi26. That was a tendency, both to unite with the Kuomintang and to criticize and fight
against them. If you want to criticize, it is not okay to criticize the Kuomintang. For example,
in Wuhan at that time, I had left Wuhan and went to Changsha to serve as the provincial
party secretary.




24 Chen Boda (1904-1989) joined the CCP in 1927. He was a school teacher and spent four years studying
Marxism in Moscow. He exercised a leading role in the Yan’an Rectification Movement. He led the Party’s
propaganda work and was a leading promoter of Mao Zedong Thought. In 1966 he headed the Cultural
Revolution Group but his promotion of Mao’s “genius” and “absolute authority” saw him condemned as a
member of Lin Biao’s support group and he was dismissed from his posts. The Deng clique of revisionists tried
him at the same time as the Gang of Four, and he was sentenced to 18 years in prison, but given early release
due to ill health.
25 Li Weihan (1896-1984) joined the CCP in 1921. He became a member of the 6th Politburo of the Chinese
Communist Party in 1927 but fell out of favour shortly afterwards in the wake of the unsuccessful Autumn
Harvest Uprising which he sought to bring to an end, and was accused of cowardice. Li was eclipsed until
reemerging in the early 1930s as a supporter of Li Lisan, and was promoted to become the first principal of the
Yan'an-based Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, the highest training centre for party
workers and leaders. Li served as principal from 1933 to 1935 and again from 1937 to 1938. After Liberation, Li
was involved in managing China's minorities and nationalities as Chairman of the State Ethnic Affairs
Commission. He was removed from his post as Director of the United Front Department in 1964 and was
subsequently criticised by Zhou Enlai for "capitulationism in united front work". However, he reemerged after
1978 as a supporter of the revisionist Deng Xiaoping and as a critic of Mao and the CCP, which Li referred to as
"feudal". Deng promoted Li in 1982 to the post of vice chairman of the Central Advisory Commission, which
Deng himself chaired. Li died in office in August 1984.
26 Xia Xi（1901-1936）joined the CCP in 1921 and the Guomindang (during the first period of CCP-GMD
cooperation) in 1924. In April 1927, he was elected as a member of the Central Committee at the Fifth National
Congress of the Communist Party of China, and in May he became the secretary of the Hunan Provincial
Committee of the Communist Party of China. Later, he went to Moscow to study at Sun Yat-sen University,
during which he was close to Wang Ming and others, and was one of the twenty-eight and a half Bolsheviks. In
1928, Xia attended the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Moscow. In 1930, he
returned to China and served as the Propaganda Minister of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the
Communist Party of China. In January 1931, he was elected as an alternate member of the Central Committee
at the Fourth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. In April 1932,
Xia began to carry out the first of three purges in the name of "suppressing rebellion", and more than 1,000
Red Army cadres and local cadres at all levels were arrested and killed, including 27 cadres at or above the
division level, all of whom were the founders and backbone of the Second Red Army of He Long and the base
areas in western Hunan and Hubei. Among them, more than 10,000 grassroots cadres and masses were
slaughtered in the Honghu area alone. On February 28, 1936, when crossing the river in Bijie, Xia Xi fell into the
water due to physical fatigue and drowned.