Our Study and the Current Situation

The reports made by Mao Zedong at the Yan’an senior cadres’ meeting on April 12, 1944 and in the first part of the Central Party School on May 20, 1944, were based on the discussions on the history of the Party between the leading organs of the CPC Central Committee and senior cadres from 1941 to 1944.

The two speeches were consolidated into a “Report on Our Study and the Current Situation”, which was distributed to the Eighth Route Army headquarters, central bureaus and central sub-bureaus in July of the same year. In order to raise the Marxist-Leninist ideological level of Party cadres still higher, in 1942-1943 the Political Bureau held several discussions on the history of the Party, and then led the senior cadres of the whole Party in holding similar discussions during 1943-1944. On the basis of the above discussions, Mao Zedong made the two reports, focusing on three issues:

(1) On Our Study. The report emphasized that: The Central Committee holds that we should enable the cadres to become perfectly clear ideologically on the questions which arose in the history of the Party and that at the same time we should adopt a lenient policy in arriving at decisions about comrades who formerly committed errors, so that on the one hand the cadres should thoroughly understand the historical experience of our Party and avoid repeating past errors, and on the other hand all comrades can be united for our common endeavor. Treat all questions analytically; do not negate everything.

It should be stated that the line of the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of China was basically correct, since that Congress defined the character of the present revolution as bourgeois-democratic, defined the situation at that time as an interval between two revolutionary high tides, repudiated opportunism and putschism and promulgated the Ten-Point Programme.

On the question of whether the provisional central leadership that was formed in Shanghai in 1931 and the Fifth Plenary Session which it subsequently convened were legal or not. The Central Committee holds that both were legal, but it should be stated that the procedures for the election were inadequate and that this case should be taken as a historical lesson.

But what still exists in our Party to a serious extent, and almost everywhere, is a more or less blind "mountain-stronghold" mentality. The social and historical roots of the mountain-stronghold mentality lie in the fact that the Chinese petty bourgeoisie is particularly large and that for a long period our rural base areas have been cut off from one another by the enemy, while the subjective cause is the insufficiency of inner-Party education.

(2) On the Current Situation. The report points out that the present situation has two characteristics: one is that the anti-fascist front is growing stronger and the fascist front is declining, and the second is that within the anti-fascist front the people's forces are growing stronger and the anti-popular forces are declining. The growth of the people's forces in China has to be explained with our Party as the center of the picture.

(3) On the issue of getting rid of the baggage and starting up the machinery among Party cadres. "To get rid of the baggage" means to free our minds of many encumbrances. In view of the characteristics of the current situation, Mao Zedong urged the whole Party to take the lessons of the Party's history as a warning and not to repeat the mistakes of pride in victory. The so-called "starting machine" means that we should be good at using ideological organs, get rid of the strong blindness in our Party, advocate thinking, learn to analyze things, and cultivate a good style and method of analysis.

Mao Zedong's report is one of the summary documents of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, which made important ideological and theoretical preparations for the Seventh National Congress of the CPC held in 1945.