Mao Zedong's Advocacy of Reading Marxist-Leninist Classics

Mao Zedong attached great importance to educate the whole Party on the basic theories of Marxism and improving the theoretical level of Party members and cadres. To this end, he repeatedly advocated that the entire Party, especially senior cadres, should study the classical works of Marxism-Leninism. At the Seventh National Congress of the CPC held in April 1945, Mao Zedong proposed that we should read five books on Marxism-Leninism, including The Communist Manifesto, Socialism: Utopian to Scientific, and so forth. At the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Party Congress, held in March 1949, Mao Zedong once again discussed the importance of studying Marxist theory. The Second Plenary Session identified 12 books that must be read by cadres.

In order to correct the “Left” deviationist errors existing in the Party, Mao Zedong wrote in 1958 to members of the Party Committee at the central, provincial, municipal, autonomous, prefectural and county levels, suggesting that they should study Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. and Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin on Communist Society in close connection with the practice of China's socialist economic revolution and economic construction, and read each of these two books three times by heart, and analyzed as they are read and pondered about.

From December 10, 1959, to February 9, 1960, he carefully read the second volume of the Political Economics Textbook of the Soviet Union not only made extensive annotations, but also published a series of talks. These annotations and talks which were in close connection with summing up the lessons of the Chinese revolution and construction, offered many profound and original insights.

In July 1963, Mao Zedong proposed to publish a number of classical works of Marx and Engels for cadres to read. He asked the Central Publicity Department to draw up a bibliography and submit it to him for approval. He said that all Party members should read dozens of books on Marxism-Leninism. It is needed to proceed in a planned way and finish reading dozens of Marxist-Leninist books in a few years. He also pointed out that some people have no interest in reading, so they should focus on their studies first, and tens of thousands of cadres above the middle level ranks should learn from them. It would be a progress if only 200 cadres really understand Marxism-Leninism.

On December 31 of the same year, the Publicity Department submitted to the CPC Central Committee a request report on organizing senior cadres to study the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin and a catalogue of 30 works for cadres to select and read. To this end, Mao Zedong instructed: This selection is "very good". In July 1963, Mao Zedong, in order to help people, study Marxism-Leninism, proposed that prefaces and annotations should be written for a selection of 30 classical works of Marxism-Leninism, and that it could be allowed that the number of characters of the prefaces and annotations could exceed the number of characters of the original text.

In December 1965, he once more raised the issue of writing prefaces for Marxist-Leninist works and brought several "outstanding scholars" to Hangzhou to carry out this work. At that time, he especially reminded that the prefaces should be written in the context of the practical experience of the Chinese revolution. Unfortunately, this initiative was interrupted by the “Cultural Revolution” as soon as it started.