Building the Party First Ideologically

Putting ideological construction as top priority in Party building is a major feature of Mao Zedong's Party building thought personally, and also of the Mao Zedong Thought. If we do a good job in the ideological construction of the Party, we will grasp the essence of the Party building.

In semi-colonial and semi-feudal China, the Party members of the CPC were composed of peasants and other revolutionary strata with of petty bourgeois class origin. This had inevitably brought a large number of non-proletarian ideas into the Party, consequently how to ensure the proletarian and vanguard nature of the Party became a prominent problem in the construction of the Party in that period. The idea of building the Party ideologically as the first priority was put forward to solve this problem.

First of all, in order to build the Party ideologically, we must strengthen Marxist education, help Party members to draw a clear line between proletarian and petty bourgeois ideology, combat, overcome and correct non-proletarian ideologies, establish the sense of serving the people wholeheartedly as the purpose whole members, establish the idea that people's interests are above everything else, and establish a communist world views.

When focusing on building the Party ideologically, we need to carry out vigorous ideological struggle and oppose all kinds of erroneous ideas and trend of thoughts. Mao Zedong pointed out: "If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end”. He advocated vigorous ideological struggle and clarified the correct methods of ideological struggle within the Party, that is to help Party members and Party organizations correct their ideological, political and organizational mistakes by means of criticism and self-criticism, strengthen the Party's organization and enhance its combat effectiveness. He pointed out: “in order to strengthen the building of the Party ideologically, we must oppose subjectivism and all kinds of individualism, and we must practice inner-Party democracy and democratic centralism and strengthen Party discipline.”