GenZedong

Talks With Mao Yüan-hsin July 5, 1964

| THE CHAIRMAN (staring angrily at Mao Yüan-hsin):

In fact, you like comfort, and fear difficulties. (The Chairman, in discussing the second criterion for successors, said:) You know how to think about yourself, you spend all your time pondering your own problems. Your father (Comrade Mao Tse-min) was dauntless and resolute in the face of the enemy, he never wavered in the slightest, because he served the majority of the people. If it had been you, wouldn’t you have got down on both knees and begged for your life? Very many members of our family have given their lives, killed by the Kuomintang and the American imperialists. You grew up eating honey, and thus far you have never known suffering. In future, if you do not become a rightist, but rather a centrist, I shall be satisfied. You have never suffered, how can you be a leftist?

|YÜAN-HSIN:

Is there still some hope for me?

|THE CHAIRMAN:

Well, yes, there is hope, but if you surpass the criteria I have set, that will be even better.

(The Chairman also talked about the third criterion, saying:) When you people hold a meeting, how do you hold it? You are a squad leader; how does one go about being a squad leader? When everyone criticizes you, can you accept it? Can you accept their criticisms even if they are wrong? Can you accept a false and unjust charge? If you cannot accept it, then how can you unite people? You must especially learn to work with people who disagree with you. If you like to have people praise you, if you like to have honey on your lips, and songs to your glory in your ears, that is the most dangerous thing, and that is exactly what you do like.

(In talking about the fourth criterion, the Chairman said:) Do you unite with the masses or not? Is it not the case that you spend your time with the sons and daughters of cadres, and look down on other people? You must let people talk, and not be satisfied with letting one person settle everything.

(In talking about the fifth criterion, the Chairman said:) In this respect you have already made some progress, you have engaged in a bit of self-criticism, but it’s barely a beginning, you mustn’t think everything is all right.

(Afterwards, the Chairman once again talked about the work at the Institute: The most fundamental defect of your Institute is that you have not applied the ‘four firsts’. Didn’t you say you wanted to study Marxism-Leninism? What method of study do you employ? How much can you learn merely by relying on listening to lectures? The most important thing is to go and learn from practice.

My own thoughts: If you're trying to convince Imperialists to side with you, the best you can hope for is neutrality in most cases really. If you push them further it's like talking to a parent about why their child doesn't talk to them. This conversation requires too much spine to handle. They will immediately short circuit and start moralizing.

That's what human being are like, in our age. The path of least resistance. This is not an inevitability and it won't always be like this, but right now we're going through a slow decomposition of the core, the violence of the periphery is accelerating this decomposition and sooner or later a sort of plague will burst open. All the trauma and hardship gathered down there since the establishment of settler colonial nation, that has never been addressed, it will be unable to be contained and burst. They didn't want to deal with it because it's too much, so it just gets bigger and they try to put colorful stickers and blue tape on rusted pipes they don't want to fix.

They can't imagine a future where they actually stand in unity. The best they can hope for is add another layer of paint, add another layer of paint, let the mold grow under, add another layer of paint.

Edited for spelling mistakes.

One thing I try to remind of, and what you wrote reminded me of, is this from On Revolutionary Medicine from Che Guevara.

We must, then, begin to erase our old concepts and begin to draw closer and closer to the people and to be increasingly aware. We must approach them not as before. You are all going to say, 'No. I like the people. I love talking to workers and peasants, and I go here or there on Sundays to see such and such.' Everybody has done it. But we have done it practising charity, and what we have to practice today is solidarity. We should not go to the people and say, 'Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you our science, to show you your errors, your lack of culture, your ignorance of elementary things.' We should go instead with an inquiring mind and a humble spirit to learn at that great source of wisdom that is the people.

Two main thoughts come to mind for me:

I think of the story of the "last emperor of China" who the CPC put to the challenge of reeducating (and succeeded): https://bsky.app/profile/poppyhaze.bsky.social/post/3lea2lmvmg22j

It demonstrates just how far you can go in changing a person sometimes. That is, when you have the power to do so and I think that is the main obstacle, as you touch on when you say "we have been unable to succeed against the overwhelming power of the imperialist bourgeoisie."

It brings me to another, related (partly self-crit) of western thought, which is that of speaking as if we have power we don't. So like, yes, the western imperial institutions have a lot of power and have had for a long time. But your average everyday liberal will tend to be at most possessing some minor influence over one minor organization or another. The majority of the power is concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population.

When one of us says some shit, it can influence some people, but it's not the enacting of a broad policy or something. Same with when some random liberal mouths off. However, the type of thinking that goes with colonialism and imperialism instills in westerners a sense of power even when they materially have little (as we see with the bizarre behavior of a declining EU at times). Like a "believing your own lies" type of thing. This idea that the western is actually superior somehow and this means westerners just kinda wake up with smarter and brighter brains than the rest of the world, and this enables them to impact the world through that superiority alone. Instead of the reality: the guns, brutality, and mass murder campaigns that have fueled the actual power, which is, again, policy directed and power concentrated among the few, not the many, no matter how smug some of the many sound at times.

Unique material conditions are what lead each of us to class consciousness not some sort of moral/intellectual/educational supremacy.

I agree that moral superiority is not what got us there. We aren't imbued with some kind of special trait that makes us better than others and that's why we got where we did. However, I'd also caution against it sounding too close to a mechanical materialist view, that we didn't have agency in the decisions but were led only by our material conditions. I don't believe that's what you intend to say. I just want to make the point out of caution for readers. Our choices do matter at some stage of it, but I would say, the more collectivist rather than faulty individualist view would be that many of our choices are more enmeshed in the choices of others than is sometimes comfortable to acknowledge (but we cannot possibly figure out how to enact change if we don't recognize it). That we are not standing at the shore, looking out upon the sea, and deciding what the ocean is like. We are constantly in the ocean, the waves are real and immediate, and yes, we can swim and push and pull, but it is delusional for us not to acknowledge the heaviness of that.

Even cynical marketing campaigns understand this on some level. Word of mouth recommendation is one of the most powerful forms of sales. And notably, it is people speaking to each other and influencing one another, not people lining up at a booth for a marketing team to try to convince each of them individually, one at a time. Social ties are powerful and social fragmentation, both incidental as a result of capitalist development and purposeful as a tool of control, has reduced people's effectiveness to rally together for getting needs collectively met.

Beliefs of moral superiority, intellectual superiority, hell superiority of preference for mundane things, can all exacerbate fragmentation and contribute to enforcing class/caste divides. We have to figure out how to transform society, not just analyze it as it is right now. That's what fills me with awe about what China demonstrated in the story I mentioned. The transformative power that they had and continue to demonstrate in so many ways in the decades since.

(This went on a lot more than I thought it would when I said "two main thoughts" lol. It's probably a bit more than two...)