National, Scientific and Mass Culture

In his “On New Democracy” Mao Zedong pointed out: A national, scientific and mass culture—such is the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal culture of the people, the culture of New Democracy, the new culture of the Chinese nation.” In April 1945, Mao Zedong's political report on "On Coalition Government" at the Seventh National Congress of the CPC clearly pointed out: The culture of New Democracy should likewise be "shared by all the common people", that is, it should be a national, scientific and mass culture, and must under no circumstances be a culture "privately owned by the few"…“The Chinese people's culture and education should be new-democratic, that is to say, China should establish her own new national, scientific and mass culture and education.”

Mao Zedong also elaborated on the three basic characteristics of the new democratic culture: “New-democratic culture is national. It opposes imperialist oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation. It belongs to our own nation and bears our own national characteristics. It links up with the socialist and new-democratic cultures of all other nations and they are related in such a way that they can absorb something from each other and help each other to develop, together forming a new world culture; but as a revolutionary national culture it can never link up with any reactionary imperialist culture of whatever nation”. He said: "Chinese culture should have its own form, its own national form. National in form and new-democratic in content—such is our new culture today”. “New-democratic culture is scientific. It opposes all feudal and superstitious ideas; it stands for seeking truth from facts, for objective truth and for the unity of theory and practice. On this point, the possibility exists of a united front against imperialism, feudalism and superstition between the scientific thought of the Chinese proletariat and those Chinese bourgeois materialists and natural scientists who are progressive, but in no case is there a possibility of a united front with any reactionary idealism. In the field of political action Communists may form an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal united front with some idealists and even religious people, but we can never approve of their idealism or religious doctrines.”

An important task of the cultural work in the new period is to advocate and publicize Marxism and help more and more people learn to proceed from reality and adopt the materialistic ideological line of seeking truth from facts and integrating theory with practice in order to understand, study and solve the problems.

He added: “New-democratic culture belongs to the broad masses and is therefore democratic. It should serve the toiling masses of workers and peasants who make up more than 90 percent of the nation's population should gradually become their very own. There is a difference of degree, as well as a close link, between the knowledge imparted to the revolutionary cadres and the knowledge imparted to the revolutionary masses, between the raising of cultural standards and popularization”. Here, above Mao Zedong emphasized that the revolutionary culture should serve as a powerful revolutionary weapon for the toiling masses of workers and peasants and that "the people are the inexhaustible and rich source of revolutionary culture". Only by creating a mass revolutionary culture can the revolutionary movement be carried out smoothly and effectively”. He added: “A revolutionary cultural worker who is not close to the people is a commander without an army, whose fire-power cannot bring the enemy down.” Therefore, “both the cultural and practical movements must be of the masses. Therefore, all progressive cultural workers must have their own cultural battalions, that is, the broad masses”. Such national, scientific mass culture has demonstrated the revolutionary spirit of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism and has laid the ideological foundation of the CPC's new democratic culture conception.