智慧的寶貴，在于他不會衰老和過時.....

書名﹕中國問題
作者﹕羅素

中文版: http://ishare.iask.sina.com.cn/f/20815745.html
英文版: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13940

內容簡介 •
　　本書是作者來華講學之后定作的唯一一部關于中國的專著。羅素以其博大精深的思考和豁達坦誠的心態，既入世又出世地為西方讀者系統闡述了中國問題：立足中國的立場談中國的政治、經濟工期業和教育，立足西方立場談中西文化的對比和中國人的性格。全書回顧中國的過去，剖析中國的現實，展望對中國的未來，集中体現了羅素在中國問題上的人文關怀和社會關怀，以及代表現代知識分子社會良知的關怀。這個全譯本從一個側面忠實地反映了羅素對中國的印象和中國對羅素的影響。

作者簡介 • • • • • •
　
　伯蘭特‧羅素是20世紀聲譽卓著、影響深遠的英國哲學家，偉大的思想家。他一生著述丰富，涉及哲學、數學、科學、倫理、社會、教育、歷史、宗教、政治等廣泛領域，尤以數學和邏輯研究上建樹突出，他在人文科學方面的成果宏大，從而成為人類文明史上的寶貴精神財富。

目錄 • • • • • •

　　前言

第一章 中國的种种問題
畫家窮困而死，收藏家則收購他們的遺作，卻自夸為慈善之舉……中國也許可以視為一個藝術家的國度，她具有藝術家所具有的所有善惡之德；其善主要有利他人，而其惡卻足以危害自己。

第二章 19世紀以前的中國
如今稱中國為China，其實來自秦始皇的姓（Tsin或Chin）的讀音漢字……足以讓后人追根溯源。愛國主義容易導致軍國主義和帝國主義。為國盡忠的最好方法就是殺人；而孝道利家的最好方法則是受賄和耍陰謀。

第三章 中國与西方各國
中國文化中有個弱點：缺乏科學。一個英國人殺一個中國人比一個中國人殺一個英國人要容易……

第四章 現代中國
歐洲文化中改變中國傳統習慣的，除了戰爭，就是商業和知識這兩方面。中國人的生活給中國人的幸福，要比英國人的生活帶給英國人的幸福多得多。

第五章 明治維新前的日本
日本人有一种偏執：喜歡把政府分离為“真正的”和“名義上的”兩种。

第六章 現代日本
日本……能把大多數歐洲人認為是水火不相容的東西糅合在一起。人為地制造對天皇的崇拜是近代日本最有趣的一個現象，這种制止民眾變得清醒理智的方法頗值得其他國家仿效。

第七章 1914年之前的日本与中國
乍一看……中日兩國都是黃种人……但他們在政治上、文化上的相似之處卻很少。日本的名流自詡本國為世界最大的國家……中國的革命党剛萌芽，日本就加以扶持。

第八章 “大戰”中的日本与中國
日本……把中國作為試驗新式武器的場地……日本發現可以利用中國的參戰加劇內訌，這种做法是符合它一貫的對華政策的。

第九章 華盛頓會議
對于中國來說，在華盛頓取得的最大成果是關于山東的條約。

第十章 遠東當前的各种勢力与發展趨勢
高尚的理想本身也未必能給信奉它的人帶來純粹的幸福。中國一定要明白決不能讓工業利潤流人外國人之手。

第十一章 中西方明的對比
中國的傳統文明中，有一個，并且只有一個外國的因素，那就是佛教……猶太教和科學產國文明中沒有。中國實際上是個缺乏宗教的國家，不僅上層社會沒有宗教，全体人民也同樣沒有……中國人的寬容，歐洲人根据本國經歷是無法想象的。

第十二章 中國人的性格
中國人最值得稱道的事情是，他們總能得到外國人的好感。外國人對中國人的“要面子”覺得很可笑。中國人的性格中最讓歐洲人惊訝的莫過于他們的忍耐了。

第十三章 中國的高等教育
喜歡文學藝術的人容易將中國誤解為……一個文物博物館。中人要用這樣一种敢于怀疑和發問的自由精神建設一种与其鼎盛時期的舊文化相媲美的新文化。

第十四章 中國的工業
從中國人的脾气和傳統來看，更适宜于從事商業而不是工業……不過工業的發展一定要由中國人而不是外國人來主持，這是至關重要的。

第十五章 中國的前途
中國必須自救，而不能依靠外人……要用公共思想取代舊時的家族倫理觀念。

附言

譯后記

The Historical Significance of Mao Zedong

The Historical Significance of Mao Zedong
http://www.henryckliu.com/page260.html

By
Henry C.K. Liu (廖子光)

The protracted history of the Chinese socialist revolution started 94 years ago in 1919 on May 4, when 5,000 students from Beijing University and twelve other schools held a political demonstration in front of Tiananmen, the focal point of what is today known as Tiananmen Square. The demonstration sparked what came to be known in history as the May Fourth Movement of 1919-21, an anti-imperialism movement rising out of patriotic reactions to dishonorable foreign relations of the government of China’s then warlord Yuan Shi-kai (袁世凯) that led to unjust treatment of China by Western powers at the Versailles Peace Conference. May Fourth was a political landmark that consolidated the nation's collective awareness that Western democracy is as imperialistic as the Western monarchy it overthrew. This national collective awareness turned China from Western democracy towards the path of modern socialism through Marxist-Leninist proactive revolution.

Mao Zedong at the time of the May 4th Movement was 26 years old and a librarian assistant in Beijing University where he spent time in the stacks reading about heroic nationalist leaders such as George Washingon, Napoleon and Bismark and became inspired by their world-changing patriotic deeds."

As a son of a small farming family that enjoyed comfortable living on three arces of land in rural Shao-shan in Hunan province, Mao in his youth spent his spare time after working in the field reading Chinese history and literature in the newly-opened public library in nearby Changsha. He was particularly inspired by the legalist policies of Qin Shi Wang (秦始皇; 259 BC – 210 BC) and the theme of Water Margin (水浒传), a 14th century novel of uiversal brotherhood and one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature
Before going to Beijing, Mao attended First Normal School of Changsha, coming under the influenced of several progressive teachers there, including a professor of ethics named Yang Changji (杨昌济 1871-1920), who urged Mao and other students to read a radical newspaper, New Youth (新青年) founded by Marxist Chen Duxiu (陈独秀1879–1942), Dean of the Faculty of Letters at Beijing University.

In 1918, after graduating from First Normal School of Chansha, Mao moved to Beijing, to join Yang Changji who had been recently appointed professor at Peking University by Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培1868-1940), the progressive president. Yang recommended Mao to be an assistan to university librarian Li Dazhao (李大钊1889–1927), a Marxist intellectual in China who later participated the the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921.

Li wrote a series of articles in New Youth on the October Revolution which had just taken place in Russia, during which the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) seized state power. Lenin had put forth the theory of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism based on the writings of John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940), building on the socio-economic-political theory of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) in the mid-19th century from observation on turbulent European conditions.

Li's articles helped create interest in Marxism in the Chinese revolutionary movement, as an alternative to Western-style democracy that had been subscribed by the 1911 bourgeios Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen, but had proved wanting in the behavior of Western democracies at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Marxism was then recognized by Chinese revolutionary intellectuals as a more effective ideology in the struggle against Western imperialism even when many of the concepts of Marxism apply only to Euroepan situations

The May Fourth Movement marked a turn by anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals towards revolutionary Marxism. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was a major factor in forming the views of Li Dazhao on the revolutionary role of the state. Li initiated the Peking Socialist Youth Corps in 1920 and in July 1921 co-founded the Communist Party of China (CPC) with Chen Duxiu, who had been exposed to socialist ideas in Japan, as a political institution with the secular program to seize power of the state to carry out socialist revolution in China. A revolutionary state is the rationale for a one-party government, provided that the ruling party represents the interest of the people. Li was a mentor to Mao Zedong who openly acknowledged having been influenced by Li’s ideas.
The first edition of Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, which appeared in April 1924, seven years after the October Revolution of 1917, asks: “Is it possible to attain the final victory of socialism in one country, without the combined efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries?” The answer was: “No, it is not. The efforts of one country are enough for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie [in one country]. This is what the history of our revolution tells us. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country like ours, are not enough. For this we must have the efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries.”
The strategic key words on socialist internationalism are ‘final victory’ which cannot be achieved with just ‘socialism in one country’, and the phrase “the proletariat of several advanced countries”. But ‘final’ implies not immediate but in the future, even the distant future. And international communism was focused not on the whole world, but on “the proletariat of several advance countries” where evolutionary conditions were considered as ripe. It was not focused on the peasantry still living under agricultural feudal societies outside of Europe or the oppressed people of imperialist colonies and semi-colonies.
To both Lenin and Stalin, the path to liberation in the colonies of the Western empire was to strengthen the only socialist country in the world, namely the Soviet Union, and to weaken capitalism at the core, namely industrialized economies, to end its final stage of imperialism. In theory, the liberated industrial workers of the Western advanced economies would in turn help liberate the oppressed peasants in the colonies and semi-colonies in the still not industrialized economies.

Unfortunately, actual events failed to support this theory. There was no worker uprising in the advanced economies. In fact, unionism in the advanced economies sided with management and turned anti-communist. These trends support the truth that liberation cannot be delivered by others and must be won by the victims themselves. Each oppressed group must struggle for self liberation through internal political consciousness.

Both Lenin and Stalin failed to recognize the inherently powerful but latent revolutionary potential of the peasants of the pre-industrial colonies and semi-colonies of the Western Empires, which had to wait until the emergence of Mao Zedong in China to force the world to acknowledge this truth in history. Mao, in placing his faith in the revolutionary potential of the Chinese peasantry, redefined the term “proletariat” to mean those deprived of property, a property-less class, away from the European idea of the proletariat as the class of urban industrial workers.

The October Revolution of 1917 was launched on the slogan: “All Power to the Soviets” through which the minority Bolsheviks won political leadership in the Soviets, which were workers councils that constituted the power behind the new socialist state. Bourgeois liberal democracy was not an objective of the October Revolution, but rather a target for elimination in order to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in the context of socialist revolution through class struggle.
This was because in feudal Russia in 1917, the proletariat as a dominant class was an abstraction yet to be created as a reality by industrialization. The proletariat in its infancy, small in number, could not possibly command a majority under universal suffrage in a feudal agricultural society. Therefore dictatorship of a minority proletariat is the only revolutionary path towards socialism.
In pre-industrial societies, liberal representative democracy is by definition reactionary in the absence of a dominant working class. Lenin considered the revolution in Russia as a fortuitous beginning of an emerging socialist world order that required and justified a dictatorship of the proletariat to sustain revolutionary progress.

Leninists work for the acceleration of socio-economic dialectics by the violent overthrow of capitalism just as capitalism had been the violent slayer of feudalism. Evolutionary Marxists, such as social democrats, believe in scientific dialectic materialism which predicts the inevitability of the replacement of capitalism by socialism as a natural outcome of capitalism’s internal contradiction.

But the evolutionary process requires the emergence of capitalism as a natural outcome of feudalism’s internal contradiction. Marx saw the process of evolution toward socialism as taking place in the most advanced segment of the world, in capitalistic societies of industrialized Western Europe when the ruling bourgeoisie had replaced the aristocracy as a result of the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution showed that geopolitical conditions have opened up opportunities for revolutions in pre-industrialized nations and it is in these pre-industrial societies that radical revolution is needed to bring about instant socialism by short-circuiting the long evolutionary process from feudalism to capitalism to socialism.
In Germany, the most industrialized country in the second half of the 19th century, Social Democrat icons such as Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, titans of Marxist exegesis, favored gradual, non-violent and parliamentary processes to effectuate inevitable dialectic evolution towards socialism because of the existence in Germany of a large working class. These Marxists subscribed to the doctrine of evolutionary Marxism which renders revolution unnecessary as socialism would arrive naturally from capitalism as an evolutionary process of dialectic materialism.
On the other end of the spectrum were radical revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the Spartacists, founded in the summer of 1915 when they withdrew from the German Social-Democrat Party (SDP) because of SDP support for Germany’s participation in the First World War. The Spartacists staged an abortive coup to overthrow the young social democratic government in Germany. For communists, revolution is necessary in order to short circuit the long stage of capitalism during which the evolutionary process can be halted by unionism and the introduction of a mixed economy through the injection of socialist dimension in the capitalist system. This is particularly true for pre-industrial feudal societies when a capitalist system with socialist dimension can be employed to ward off any revolutionary pressure.
The call by radical Leninists for worldwide coalition of the browbeaten proletariat majority in the industrial societies in the West, who were still deprived of political power beyond the structural dialectical process, and the agitating proletariat minority in the agricultural societies in whose name radical Leninists had gained state power in Russia, was most threatening to the rulers of the capitalist order in the advanced imperialist countries.
Reaction to this threat gave rise to insidious anti-communism in the imperialist West to prevent the arrival of socialism in the strongholds of industrial capitalism ahead of its evolutionary schedule. In the advanced economies, state-sponsored capitalist propaganda was conditioning workers into an active anti-communist force through industrial unionism and the addictive appeal of individualistic bourgeois freedom to neutralize collective working class solidarity.
Still, all Marxists share the belief that the structural antagonism between a capitalist bourgeoisie class and a proletariat class in advanced economies was a necessary precondition for creating socialism. It required the resolution of the contradiction between the efficient productivity of capitalism and the economic dysfunctionality of the mal-distribution of wealth inherent in capitalism. The good of capitalism is its efficiency in creating wealth; the bad is that the way wealth is created in capitalism requires wealth to go to the wrong places, to those who need it least, namely the rich rather than the poor who need it most. Also, awareness was increasing that capital in the modern financial system comes increasingly from the pension funds of workers in capitalist society with socialist dimensions - the welfare state.

Wealth is Good

Wealth is good; it is the mal-distribution of it that is bad and creates socio-economic conflicts. And if that mal-distribution is carried out through class lines, then struggle must be part of a socialist revolution.

The internal contradiction of capitalism is that it creates wealth by widening the gap between rich and poor. Wealth disparity is a polluting socio-economic by-product of capitalist wealth creation, like the nuclear waste in nuclear energy.
While capital cannot create wealth without labor, the proletariat in advanced economies, oppressed by a pro-capital legal-political regime, never managed to gain control of ownership of the means of production financed by their own wealth, stored in worker pension funds. Thus oppressed workers remained silently, docile victims of capitalist exploitation by capitalists using workers’ own retirement money as capital.
Apologists for capitalism then create the myth of capital being needed to create employment, ignoring the fact that it is the saved income from employed workers that creates capital. In other words, employment creates capital, not the other way around. Chinese reformers have yet to understand this truism when they accept low wages in order to attract capital investment.
The global financial crisis that began in 2007 in New York is a live demonstration of the self-destructive potential of finance capitalism when not supported by full employment with rising wages, which then forces needed consumption to be financed by consumer debt which inevitably will become unsustainable.
The current financial crisis of unsustainable debt around the world has ignited populist demand for socio-political changes in all countries. These populist changes will transform the existing socio-economic world order, even though it is too early to predict what shape his new world order will take. Suffice to observe that changes in government toward progressive populism are now taking place in every nation, except perhaps China where a one-party government lead by the communist party still governs. But many Western-trained Chinese neoliberal economists continue to argue for more free markets that uses market forces to keep wages low.
The agraraian socio-eonomic conditions in czarist Russia and dynastic China, while not congruent to each other, were fundamentally different from the industrial conditions in Europe where the Industrial Revolution had taken place to bring into existence a large working class of factory workers that was supposed to be ripe for the revolutionary class struggle as envisioned by Marx at the start of the 1848 Democratic Revolutions.

Tragically, the socialist movements were crushed and their revolutonary leaders murdered by reactionary forces in both Germany and France. The capitalist democratic regimes that followed inherited and embraced with renewed vigor Western imperialism and its colonies around the world.

Russia and China, both great nations with glorious histories that had fallen socio-economically and technologiaclly backward, were not touched by Industrial Revolution to bring forth a class of industrial workers. The oppressed classes in these two agrarian societies were rural peasants which constitued over 80% of the population.

However, in semi-colonial China, a powerful domestic comprador class had emerged to serve advancing Western imperialism. Compradors in China were Chinese managers or senior local employees that worked for large transnational foreign commercial enterprises active in China. These compradors, becoming rich and powerful serving foreign economic and political interests against China's national interest, had close symbiotic connection with Western imperialism and its exploitative foreign capital and businesses. This comprador class flourished in Western colonies in China such as Hong Kong and the five Open Port Cities established by unfair terms of the unequaled treaties forced on China by Western imperialist powers after China repeatedly lost the Opium Wars of 1839-42.

Under the current market economy in present-day China, a large new comprador class has re-emerged to again serve foreign corporate interest backed by US global geopolitical strategy to defuse revolutionary pressure while transferring wealth from China to the West in the name of free trade denominated in paper fiat dollars. Even Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have become leading compradors for foreign commercial and financial enterprises in China's increasingly open markets since the introduction of the "reform and open" policy in 1978. The full implementation of WTO rules will strengthen the comprador role of Chinese state-owned banking institutions

These SOEs having been tutored by experienced Chinese compradors from Hong Kong which had became a British colony in 1841 and not returned to Chinese sovereignty until 1997. Even after Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty, its compradors have continue to provide traitorous advice to Chinese leaders who did not know better, having been involuntarily isolated from the economic process of the modern world through decades of US anti-communist total embargo. These Hong Kong compradors have profited obscenely from bridging the gap in the different levels of development between China and the advanced Westion nations while locking China by policy into another century of semi-colonial fate.

The two most grevious errors made by China's "reform and open" policy of 1978 by following poisonous advice of Hong Kong compradors are:
1) China by policy tries to modernize and develop its economy through the exploitation of low-wage labor for export, leading Chinese society to structural faults of low income and wealth disparity as well as uneven locational development. China has now developed not regions where China needs most, but regions where Western markets find most convenient from which to exploit the Chinese economy.
2) China by policy volntarily opens its market to domination by Western capital, and returns its national economy to semi-colonial status while being idiotically pleased with comprador earnings from commission while massive amount of wealth are leaking into foreign pockets.

This kind of bad addvice naturally came from Hong Kong compradors to reflect the limit of their own slave mentality. It was like asking a house slave for advice on liberation by armed uprising. The answer is always: "Don't even think about it."
These are the structural reasons why the Chinese economy built on the "reform and open" policy is plighted with inequality and unevenness, not to mention corruption. While "reform and open" can be good policy for all nations in the modern interconnected world, the strategy and implementation of China's "reform and open" policy needs to be reconsidered to correct its foundation of prenacious new compradorism and to prevent this unsavory practice from siphoning more wealth into foreign pockets in a zero sum game.

Mao Zedong wrote the following words in Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society (March 1926) to combat two deviations then found in the Party:
The exponents of the first deviation, represented by Chen Duxiu, were concerned only with cooperation with the ruling Kuomindang and neglecting the peasants.
This was Right opportunism.
The exponents of the second deviation, represented by Zhang Guotao, were concerned only with China's [non-existent] industrial labor movement, also neglecting the peasants. This was Left opportunism
Both were aware that they were lacking in mass support, but neither knew where to seek reinforcements or to generate popular support on a mass scale.
Mao pointed out that the Chinese peasantry was the most oppressed and numerically the largest force of the Chinese proletariat (无产阶级), defined in Chinese political nomenclature as property-less class, not just factory workers, and placed class struggle in the Chinese revolution as one between the peasant proletariat class and the comprador class as local agents of Western imperialism
Moreover, Mao saw that the national bourgeoisie is actually a vacillating class, while being antagonistic to stronger foreign competition and being quick studies of imperialist modes of operation to in turn oppress a small but growing new working class of factory workers in the home market. Mao predicted that the national bourgeoisie as a class would disintegrate in an upsurge of popular revolution, with its right-wing going over to the side of Western imperialism. This prediction had been borne out a year later by political events surrounding Jiang Jieshi's counter-revolutionary coup d'état in 1927.
Today, the national bourgeoisie in China contitutes what General Secretary Xi Jinping calls "special interest groups" (特殊利益群体) which present themselves as formidable organized obstacles to true reform. Many of them are modern-day compradors.

Mao asks: "Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution."
It is a question that needs to be asked today by all Chinese patriots.
"The landlord class and the comprador class are our enemies," Mao answers.

In China today, a new landlord class is emerging as real estate developers and speculator, and a new comprador class is firmly in charge of the Chinese economy to serve the benefit of foreign institutions of neo-liberalism, the new face of Western imperialism around the world.

In the first general study meeting of the Politburo of the 18th Party Congress, General Secretary Xi Jinping talked emphatically about "firmly upholding the socialist road (坚持社会主义道路), firmly upholding the people's democratic dictatorship (坚持人民民主专政), firmly upholding leadership of the Communist Party of China (坚持中国共产党的领导) and firmly upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought (坚持马列主义、毛泽东思想).

Echoing Deng Xiaoping's famous 1992 Southern Tour (南巡) 20 years ago to reaffirm the policy of "reform and open", Xi Jinping as new leader, conducted his own new Southern Tour to Shenzhen shortly after assuming office as Party General Secretary to reaffirm the continuation of China's policy of "reform and open".

Large in Xi Jinping's reform policy are new emphases on anti-corruption (反腐) and attack on special interest groups (打击特殊利益群体), adjustment in income disparity and aggressive improvement in the living standard of the people by promoting common prosperity (共同富裕). The compromise of "letting some people get rich first" which the comprador and national bourgeoisie classes have conveniently dropped the word "first" in practice appears to be ending under the new leadership of Xi Jingping.

Mao said that in economically backward and semi-colonial China, the landlord class and the comprador class were appendages of the international bourgeoisie, depending on imperialism for survival, prosperity and growth. These classes represented the most backward and most reactionary relations of production in China and hindered the development of her own productive forces. Their existence is utterly incompatible with the aims of the Chinese revolution, Mao emphasized. He went on to crushed them as enemy classes early after gaining state power.

The big landlord and big comprador classes in particular always sided with imperialism and constituted an extreme counterrevolutionary group. They made counter-revolutionary careers for themselves by opposing the Communist Party and received subsidies from various groups of reactionaries in power, from imperialists and the right-wing of the Kuomindang, Mao added.

Under the "reform and open" policies since 1978, a new landlord class has re-emerged made up of real estate developers and speculators, and a new comprador class has re-emerged in the commercial and financial markets in China. The nation's best young talents after having been educated in top Chinese universities and foreign graduate schools have mostly been co-opted by Western companies to act as compradors in all sectors in the Chinese economy: industry, commerce, technology, journalism, and even national security analysis. China's "reform and open" policy has legalized foreign infiltration into every aspect of its economy and society, allow Hong Kong, now officially under Chinese sovereignty, to continue to be an anti-China foreign base and a hot-bed safe haven for corruption on the mainland.

The greatness of Mao Zedong lies in his revolutionary insight that socialist revolution in China must come from liberating the peasants and that the purpose of revolution is to rid China of Western imperialistic oppression to revive China's historcal greatness as an prosperous, independent great power. Mao understood clearly that such pupose can only be fulfilled with the support of all Chinese people around the world who have not sold out mentally or financially to foreign enemies.

The task of the Chinese Communst Party is to galvanize the power of the masses for a victorious revolution, to unite all who can be united and to crush traitorous special interest gorups, the new compradors. A harmonious society has no room for comprador traitors and other enemies of the people. The revolution cannot be won by catering to the democratic politics of special interest groups acting as agents of a new global imperialism.

Mao understood that the path of reviving China to its historical greatness as a nation lies in creating a harmonious society of equality within China before China can gain equaility among nations of the world. Harmony and inequality are not compatible conditions in any society. Harmony cannot be achieved by appeasing new compradors who are bad elements that create disharmony and inequality by helping foreign interest exploit the Chinese people. A harmonious organism cannot tolerate a growing cancer in its body.

Mao saw Marxism as the most appropriate and effective ideology to implement the national goal of harmonious revival. Mao was the first Chinese revolutionary to advocate an approach which later came to be known as "socialism with Chinese characteristics". To Mao, Marxist-Leninist ideology must be adjusted to Chinese situations to serve the revitalization of China's historical greatness, not the other way around. The Chinese characterisitcs Mao had in mind is not the same of Chinese charateristics of the "reform and open" policy since 1978. Mao never entertained the fantasy that letting enemies of the revolution into the Party Central Committee is the path to revolutionary victory. Victory by Surrenderism is merely self-deception. The Party must purge such self-deception from the highest level of its leadership for the Party to continue to derserve the support of the people.

Mao's post as a librarian assistant in Beijing University in 1918 gave him the opportunity to discovering firsthand newly-translated socialist writings in Chinese, further expanding his understanding and commitment to the revolutionary socialist cause. He read Chinese translation of Thomas Kirkup's A History of Socialism, Karl Kautsky's Karl Marx's Ökonomische Lehren (translated from German) and most importantly, Marx and Engels' political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto.

Mao also read widely beyond Marxist works. He read the translated works of Western classical liberalism such as Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations which deals with the necessary role of government to restrict monopolitic international trade, ideas that influenced Alexander Hamilton's protectionist, nationalist industrial policies, modeled after Colbert's dirigism in France under Louis XIV to resist British monopolisitc dominance over New World commerce in the United States during its infancy. For the first hundred years in US history of two centuries, the young nation resisted British and French domination to build its own prosperity through protecionism and nationalist industrial policies of support national industries.
Mao also read Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, which identifies environmental influence as a material condition of national socio-political culture. He read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, in which Mill addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society through government over the political rights of individuals, and that individuals need to be restrained by government from doing lasting and serious harm to themselves and to the community by the "no harm" principle. Because no individual can exist in isolation, harm done to oneself or one's own property or well-being also harm others and the ccommunity as a socio-economic organism. The destruction of even one's own property deprives as well the community of its communal interest in that very property.
Mill also holds the opinion that dictaorship is an acceptable form of government for those societies that are still developing, as long as the dictator serves the best interests of the people, because existing barriers to spontaneous socio-economic progress can only be overcome by strong and effective political leadership. Mill argues aganst the danger of "tyrany of the majority" in democratic systems. Mao's view on political rights runs parallel to Mill's view on the necessity of strong leadership for a good cause. All revolutionary governments are dictatorial governments by definition. They turn democratic only after the revolution has been solidly won. On economic development, democracy is a product, not a cause of prosperity, US neoliberal propaganda notwithstanding.
Without Mao's heroic leadership in the historic Zunyi Meeting (遵义会议 on January 15-17, 1935) in the midst of the most critical low point in Long March when the Chinese revolution faced imminent danger of total military defeat, in which Mao regained military leadership of the guerrilla war against Jiang Jieshi's regular army in the face of overwhelming odds, and Mao's military strategy from an established revolutionary base to provide an living example of a working socialist society to produce the resource necessary to carry on the revolution, the Communist Party of China would have been annihilated by vastly superior Guomindang forces as only a matter of time.
The popular slogan: "Without Mao Zedong, there would be no New China" is a historical fact. By extension, without Mao Zedong Thought, there will be no New China. Those who seek the removal of reference to Mao Zedong Thought in Party and State documents should reexamine their own thinking. Even in the US, no self-respecting citizen dares challenge the central place of Jeffersonian ideals in its national psyche.

A leader like Mao Zedong is a fortuitous gift from Heaven to the Chinese nation. Such a leader appears only once in a millennium. For the foreseeable future, Mao Zedong will be a political icon that will hold the Chinese people together and Mao Zedong Thought will live as an indispensable classic on which to rebuild the Chinese nation into a socialist society.

Mao also read Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the political philosophy of basic human nature which influenced the political discourse in the French Revolution. Mao read Charles Darwin on biological evolution and even Herbert Spencer on Social Darvinism of survival of the fittest as a self-renewing evolutionary process in Anarcho-Capitalism.

While often misinterpreted as ultra-conservative, Spencer opposed private ownerhip of land, claiming that each person has an inherent claim to participate in the use of the earth. He was sympathetic to Georgism, a US economic philosophical ideology advocated by Henry George, that people can own what they create, but have no right to own things found in nature, most specifically, land, which belong equally to all. Spencer advocated the organization of voluntary labor unions as a bulwark against "exploitation by bosses", and favored an economy organized primarily in free worker co-operatives as a replacement for wage-labor in a labor market in which worker have no market power. Such Spencerean progressive ideas have been selectively purged by modern-day capitalist propoaganda.
As China mounts an urbanization program as a dynamo for economic development, Gerogist ideas can serve as a guide to avoid allowing urbanization be captured by special interest groups for private gain at the expense of the community
There is no record of Mao having read Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish philosopher who advocated benevolent authocratic govenment and showed how a heroic leader can forge a strong state, and help create a new moral culture for a nation. Yet Mao came to the same conclusion on his own about China led by the Chinese Communist Party on behalf of the people.
Mao understood that Confucianism (儒家) had permeated Chinese society perniciously and hindered its advancement in modern times. On another front, capitalist revisionists will attempt to subvert the socialist revolution with the false notion that capitalist exploitation and inequality are the necessary ingredients of private wealth creation. Mao tried to combat both by launching mass movements, culminating in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966.
But even after a decade of enormous social upheaval, tragic personal sufferings, fundamental economic dislocation and unparalleled diplomatic isolation, Confucianism stood its ground in Chinese societal mentality. The Cultural Revolution failed to achieve its spiritual goal and degenerated into factional power struggle, with serious damage to the nation’s physical and socio-economic infrastructure and to the prestige of the Communist Party of China (CPC), not to mention the decline of popular support and near total bankruptcy of revolutionary zeal among even loyal party cadres. The fault is not with the spirit of the Cultural Revolution, but in allowing it to fall into the trap of factional power struggle that lost sight of the revolutionary purpose. The lesson for future cultural revolutions is not that they are no longer needed, but that they should never again be allowed to mutate into a factional power struggle.
Confucianism will have to wait for many more future cultural revolutions before it will be restrained in its negative influence on the Chinese civilization and to have its positive elements revived. A culture that took two millennia to develop cannot be modernized in just one century.
Realistically, nostalgia aside, the feudal system under imperial monarchy cannot be restored in modern China. Once a political institution is overthrown, all the king’s men cannot put it back together again. Nor would that be desirable. Yet the modern political system in China, despite its revolutionary clothing and radical rhetoric, is still fundamentally feudal, both in the manner in which power is distributed and in its administrative structure. This is why more cultural revolutions are necessary and will be necessary to move Chinese civilization forward in the modern world
Mao Zedong understood this need and that until China succeeds in a thorough cultural revolution, it cannot revive itself to restore its historical greatness,
However, violent revolutions cannot be regular events without destroying the very purpose that justifies them. China needs a continuous non-violent cultural revolution to ensure that its revolutionary path toward national revival through socialism is not reversed. Future cultural revolutions must be insulated from factional power struggle instigated by political opportunists in the name of ideology correctness.
Cultural revolutions do not need destructive factional political violence in the name of ideological vaccination that ends up disrupting the national purpose. Mao Zedong never condoned political violence among the people as he clearly stated in On Pracice (August 1937) and again in On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (February 27, 1957).
In Chinese Confucianism (儒家) politics, loyalty is traditionally preferred over competence. The ideal is to have both in a minister. Failing that, loyalty without competence is preferred as being less dangerous than competence without loyalty - the stuff of which successful insurrection and revolts are made. Therein lies the seed of systemic corruption in Chinese Confucianism (儒家) politics.
For socialist China, loyalty by definition is to the socialist cause, not personal relations. It is imperative that leaders remain loyal to socialist ideals. Yet loyalty to socialist ideals alone is not enough. It must be augmented by competence and virtuousness.
Confucianism (儒家), by placing blind faith in a causal connection between virtue and power, has remained the main cultural obstacle to modern China’s attempt to evolve from a society governed by men into a society governed by socialist legalism (法家) which should not be confused with the Western bourgeois concept of Rule of Law. The danger of Confucianism (儒家) lies not in its aim to endow the virtuous with power, but in its tendency to label the powerful as virtuous.
In order to change Chinese feudal society toward a communist social order, which is understood by all communists as a necessary goal of human development, Mao Zedong developed out of abstract Leninist concepts specific operational methods that took on special Chinese characteristics necessary for Chinese civilization and historical-cultural conditions, its strengths and also shortcomings. These methods, above all the system of organized mass movements to achieve the advancement of the mass interest, stress the change of socio-political consciousness, i.e., the creation of new men for a new cooperative society, as the basis for changing reality, i.e., the replacement of private ownership of the mode of production by collective ownership. The concept of mass politics, relevant in Chinese political thought from ancient time, is implemented by an elite cadre corps within the party which is the political instrument of the people.

Deng Xiao is right when he said that to get rich is glorious, The fault in his declaration lies in that he should have said that to get everybody rich equally is even more glorious.
The means of production must always belong to the people. This is true also in finance. At the present time, the complex working of modern finance is kept as secret knowledge of the comprador elite in today's China. Modern finance, being an indispensable wealth creation process in the modern world, should be introduced to the people as a mass line, and not kept as exclusive intellectual property of the elite as it is in the West.
Modern finance is the most important means of production in the modern economic order; it is needed not only in capitalist markets, but also in socialist markets. The distinction between the two types of markets is to whom the created wealth belongs and to whom this created wealth should flow. In a capitalist market, the wealth flows to the privileged elite while in a socialist market, the wealth should flow to the people and distributed equally. In that sense, China is still not a socialist market economy by far. "
Mao’s mass line
Mass movement as an instrument of political communication from above to below is unique to Chinese communist organization. This phenomenon, developed by Mao, is of utmost importance in understanding the nature and dynamics of the governance structure of the CPC as the ruling Party.
The theoretical foundation of mass movement as a means of mediation between the leadership and the will of the people pre-supposes that nothing is impossible for the masses, quantitatively understood as a collective unit, if their power is concentrated in and represented by a political party of correct thought and ideology and responsible actions.
This concept comes out of Mao’s romantic yet well-placed faith in the great strength of the masses who are capable of developing the nation in the interest of their own well-being and future destiny. So the “will of the masses” has to be articulated with the help of the Party but by the masses and within the masses, which the CPC calls the “mass line”.
Mao’s mass-line theory requires that the leadership elite be close to the people, that it is continuously informed about the people’s will and that it transforms this will into concrete actions by the masses. “From the masses back to the masses” is more than just a slogan. It means: take the scattered and unorganized ideas of the masses and, through study and intellectual guidance, turn them into focused and systemic programs, then go back to the masses and propagate and explain these ideals until the masses embrace them as their own and give them full support.
Thus mass movements are initiated at the highest level – the Politburo, announced to party cadres at central and regional work conferences, subject to cadre criticism and modification, after which starts the first phase of mass movement. Mass organizations are held to provoke the “people’s will”, through readers’ letters to newspapers and rallies at which these letters are read and debated. In the digital age, expressions on the Internet have augmented the role of the print media. The results are then officially discussed by the staff of leading organs of the State and the Party, after which the systematized “people's will” is clarified into acts of law or resolutions and policy and programs, and then a mass movement spreads to the whole nation.
The history of Chinese socialist politics is a history of mass movements. Mass movements successfully implemented Land Reform (1950-53); Marriage Reform (1950-52); Collectivization (1953) - the General Line of Socialist Transformation (from national bourgeois democratic revolution to proletarian socialist revolution); and Nationalization (1955 - from private ownership of industrial means of production into state ownership).
The method used against opposition was thought reform through “brainwashing” (without derogatory connotation since given in the anticommunist West), which is a principle of preferring the changing of the political consciousness of political opponents instead of physically liquidating them. The impressive opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics that television audiences saw around the world was a manifestation of Chinese socialist mass movement. It had the legacy of Mao Zedong Thought written all over it.
Before 1949, the Chinese peasant had been deprived of basic health services for over a millennium. One of the Party's first steps in medical reform called for mass campaigns against endemic infectious diseases. Tens of thousands of health workers were trained with basic hygienic and medical skills and sent out into the countryside to examine peasants and treat patients, and organize sanitation campaigns with mass movement techniques.
Health teams examined 2.8 million peasants in 1958, the first year of the schistosomiasis program. One team examined 1,200 patients in a single day. Some 67 million latrines were built or repaired, and over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of peasants were set to work day and night, drying out swamps and building drainage ditches to get rid of the infectious snail's habitat. Party workers claimed schistosomiasis cure rates of 85 to 95 percent in some areas, and that the disease had been wiped out in more than half of previously endemic areas along the Yangtze River.
Mao's Mass Movements Succeeded until 1957
The Hundred Flower Movement of 1957 was launched on February 27 by Mao with his famous four-hour speech, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”, before 1,800 leading cadres. In it, Mao distinguished “contradiction between the enemy and ourselves” from “contradiction among the people”, which should not be resolved by dictatorship, i.e., not by force, but by open discussion with criticism and counter-criticism. Up until 1957, the mass-movement policies of Mao achieved spectacular success in both social and economic construction.
Land reform was completed, the struggle for women’s emancipation was progressing well, and collectivization and nationalization were leading the nation towards socialism. Health services were a model of socialist construction in both cities and the countryside. The party’s revolutionary leadership was accepted enthusiastically by society generally and the peasants specifically. By 1958, agricultural production almost doubled from 1949 (108 million tons to 185 million tons), coal production quadrupled to 123 million tons, and steel production grew from 100,000 tons to 5.3 million tons. ...
The only problem came from bourgeois intellectual rebellion. On May 25, 1957, Mao expressed his anxiety at a session of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and gave his approval to those who warned against too much reactionary bourgeois liberty. That afternoon, Mao told cadres at a Conference of Communist Youth League that “all words and deeds which deviate from socialism are basically wrong.”
At the opening session of the People’s Congress on June 26, Zhou Enlai initiated the “counter criticism” against the critics. Mao’s call for open criticism was serious and genuine, but the discussion he had conceived as a safety valve reached a degree of intensity he had not anticipated. Mao overestimated the stability of the political climate and underestimated the residual influence of Confucianism (儒家) and that of Western liberalism.
At the Crossroads: Soviet model or independent path
Against this background, the CPC stood at the crossroads of choosing the Soviet model of development or an independent path. Economy development was based on three elements:
• Build up heavy industry before mechanization of agriculture.
• Establish an extensive system of individual incentives by means of which productive forces could be developed from a conviction that the superiority of socialist modes of production would be vindicated by a visible rise in living standards.
• The acceleration of the socialist transformation of society in order to create the precondition required by the CPC for establishing a socialist order.
Two paths were opened to the CPC leadership in 1958:
Consolidation or,
Pushing forward toward permanent revolution
Mao was forced by geopolitical conditions (the abrupt withdrawal of Soviet aid in 1960 and the US Cold War embargo from 1951 to 1973) to overcome the lack of capital and technology through mobilization of China’s vast labor reservoir. The strategy was to connect political campaigns to production campaigns. Under pressure from orthodox Leninists within the party apparatus, with the surprise failure of the “Hundred Flower Movement”, Mao concluded it was impossible to create a socialist consciousness through a gradual improvement of material living conditions; that consciousness and reality had to be changed concurrently and in conjunction through gigantic new efforts at mobilization. There was no real alternative open if new socialist China was to survive.
This conclusion has been proven correct in the past 30 years. As living standard of the people improved, inequality widened and corruption became rampant, generating intense discontent among the masses. In the nation, a blanket of spiritual decay and cynicism permeate all of society with a visible loss of revolutionary and national pride. Such loss of national spirit is harder to restore than environmental corrosion.
All of Mao's strategies and programs were designed to ensure the survival of the independence of the Chinese nation through confidence building in the people's faith in socialism. They were necessary decisions of accepting high degree of hardship and sacrifice to refuse surrender to an extremely hostile geopolitical adversary. It was a test of national will of a garrison state to survive, not an egotistic ideological experiment.
Under different geopolitical conditions, Mao would have adopted very different policies. The proof of this is the fact that it was Mao who invited US President Nixon to China as soon as Nixon realized that US national interest would be better served with an opening to China. It was a view that Mao had repeatedly made to the US all through the Cold War but were repeated rejected by the anti-communist fixation of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. It was Mao who rehabilitated the purged Deng Xiaoping to run the Chinese economy when China no longer needed to behave like a garrison state with the end of US hostility.
The garrison state mentality (警备状态心态) led to the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957-58, followed by "Three Red Banners" in the spring of 1958, initiating simultaneous development of industry and agriculture through the use of both modern and traditional methods of production under the “General Line of Building Socialism” through Self Reliance (自力更生) which had been the only option under US total embargo. The strategy was to be implemented through a labor-intensive development policy by a “Great Leap Forward” and by establishing a comprehensive collectivization with the establishment of “People's Communes”. The real purpose of the Great Leap Forward program was a defiant collective show of self confidence. That implement errors were made does not detract from its spiritual necessity. ...
While Mao headed the CPC, leadership was based on mass support; and it is still, the chairmanship of the CPC is analogous to the position of Pope in the Roman Catholic Church, powerful in moral authority but highly circumscribed in operational power. The Great Leap Forward was the product of mass movement, not of a single person. Mao’s leadership extended to the organization of the party and its policy-formulation procedures, not the dictation of particular programs.
Without Mao’s leadership, the Communist Party of China would not have survived the extermination campaign by the well-equipped Nationalist army under Jiang Jieshi. It was Mao who recognized the invincible potential of the Chinese peasant masses as the fountainhead of revolution. It is proper that the fourth-generation leaders of the PRC are again focusing on priority promotion of the welfare of the rural peasants farmers.
In Europe, the failure of the democratic revolutions of 1848 led eventually to World War I, which destroyed all the competing monarchal regimes that had collaborated to successfully suppress the democratic revolutions six decades earlier. The full impact of Mao’s revolutionary spirit is yet to be released on Chinese society. A century from now, Mao’s high-minded principles of mass politics will outshine all his anti-communist and neo-liberal critics.
The People’s Republic of China, established in 1949 under the leadership of the Communist Party of China headed by Mao Zedong, is today a rapidly developing nation of over 1.3 billion people with the world’s highest growth rate. The Chinese economy is on track to be the largest in the world. Yet until China moves expeditiously toward policies that put equality and high wages as a national goal in an independent economy, rather than one controlled by export sector special interest groups who are at the mercy of foreign consumer markets, China’s road toward achieving the highest per capita income for its economy will be agonizingly long. Without a rapid increase in Chinese wages, there will not be a vigorous domestic market to replace China's excessive dependence on export. The Chinese exporting economy will continue to be the kitchen serving the other economies as dining rooms.
The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 led to a precipitous socio-economic decline for Russia since 1990 as it went through shock treatment to rush headlong into market capitalism as advised by US neo-liberal economists. In contrast, China’s economic reform since 1978 has produced spectacular growth, albeit along with a host of unsustainable socio-economic penalties and problems. This is primarily because China has not yet totally refuted Mao Zedong Thought as Khrushchev did with de-Stalinization.
In comparison with the poor results in Russia, the question inevitably arises on why reform towards a socialist market economy by world’s largest remaining socialist state has produced comparatively positive results. What are the “Chinese characteristics” that Deng Xiaoping had identified that led to the impressive economic growth of the past three decades since 1979?
The answer leads directly to the revolutionary policies launched by Mao Zedong during the three decades between 1949 and 1979 acting as a principle that had provided a potent spiritual platform, without which Deng’s "reform and open" policy would not and could not have succeeded. Still the attempt to deemphasize Mao Zedong Thought has weaken Deng's "reform and open" policy to allow the nation to be infested with a level of corruption and inequality that even the current and coming leadership are forced to admit as dangerous for the survival of the Party.
Without the strong and broad basis for China’s revolutionary socio-economic development laid in the three decades before 1979, as part of Mao’s strategy of building essential institutional prerequisites based on a revolutionary collective awareness of the power of an organized masses and carried out through mass movement programs such as comprehensive land reforms followed by the formation of agricultural co-operatives and later people's communes, the reform policies after 1979 could not be implemented successfully.
Despite all the neo-liberal hyperboles about efficient resource allocation through the market mechanism and all the capitalist ideological anathema against egalitarianism, the solid and rational contribution by “Mao Zedong Thought” on China’s national collective consciousness of confidence in the people and self reliance remains the light source in the dark and strenuous path of the historic revival of the four-millennia-old Chinese civilization.
It was Mao who taught a thoroughly discouraged China, despite having been reduced to abject poverty materially, hopeless bankruptcy spiritually and total deprivation of confidence, to not be intimidated by temporary foreign imperialist dominance and to struggle for national revival through self-reliance by placing faith in the invincible power of the Chinese masses.
Yet despite Mao’s indispensable contribution to the Chinese collective consciousness of the dormant prowess of the masses and to the methodology of achieving economic and social development through mass movements that had enabled the economic miracle of new China, his contributions continues to be insufficiently appreciated by many Chinese revisionists and neoliberal social scientists, particularly foreign trained and supported free-market economists, who once again are falling into the heinous propaganda spell of Western cultural imperialism in the name of neo-liberal market fundamentalism.
For example, an important element of innovation in Mao’s revolutionary strategy is the capturing of the full economic advantages of abundant labor in the Chinese economy for nation-wide socialist construction on a scale never attempted in modern history in the context of hostile foreign embargo. Mao aimed to make full use of surplus labor in the Chinese socialist economy by banishing unemployment deemed necessary in Western capitalist doctrine as a required evil for combating inflation.
Unfortunately, Mao's strategy of full employment has been distorted since 1979 to turn into a policy of bringing into existence a new laboring class of exploited, poorly paid migrant workers from rural regions to overcrowded urban export sectors that depend on foreign capital to finance overblown export enterprises whose task is to ship real wealth created by low-wage Chinese labor to foreign countries in exchange for paper money in the form of fiat US dollars, leaving rural regions underdeveloped for lack of domestic capital despite, or because of, a national trade surplus denominated in fiat dollars that cannot be used domestically in China, a new imperialist monetary US strategy I call dollar hegemony.
Inequality of income and wealth has deterred China from its effort to increase the rate of domestic capital formation without undue restriction on the rate of rise in mass consumption. China today is faced with a serious unemployment and underemployment problem. This most serious underemployment comes in the form of low wages on all levels.

Many great advances, and in some sectors of the Chinese economy continued to outperform the West. The foundation of this progress can be traced to the platform built during the Cultural Revolution period. During the Cultural Revolution, China successfully test-exploded its fully functional, full-scale, three-stage hydrogen bomb (June 17, 1967), launched the Dong Fang Hong satellite (January 30, 1970) and 8 satellites more by 1978, commissioned its first nuclear submarines in 1967 which was completed in 1974, and made various other advances in science and technology. There was also progress in lasers, semiconductors, electronics, and computing technology. Even in theoretical research there was the breakthrough of synthesizing the world’s first biologically active protein, crystalline pig insulin, using the method of X-ray diffraction. This development laid the groundwork for Shanghai becoming the cradle for biotechnology in China.
Jon Sigurdson, cultural attaché in the Swedish Embassy in Beijing (1964-67), expert on rural industrialization in China at Lund University and Director of the East Asia Science & Technology and Culture Programme, at the European Institute of Japanese Studies at the Stockholm School of Economics, pointed out in 1980, this biotech work had been initiated in the late 1950s, during the Great Leap Forward (1958–61). The discovery represented “man’s great effort to unveil the secrets of life and provides powerful new evidence for the materialist-dialectical theory on the origin of life.” The report in Beijing Review accurately described it as the “first crystalline protein” and “the largest biologically active natural organic compound ever to be synthesized” (Peking Review 1967a). In an article published on December 25, 1970, the Peking Review reported another achievement: the trial production of a Shanghai electron microscope capable of 400,000-times magnification. Although the Shanghai Electronics and Optics Research Institute had been working on such microscopes since 1958, this latest, most advanced model was presented as a result of the Cultural Revolution. The Peking Review adds that such a precision instrument is a culmination of science and technology in “radio electronics, electron optics, high electric voltage, high vacuum and precision mechanical engineering” (1970)
The Post-Mao leadership typically tried to paint the Cultural Revolution as an unmitigated catastrophe for China. Sigrid Schmalzer of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst cautions that “there are compelling reasons why we should not entirely abandon the earlier, positive accounts and follow the post-Mao narrative too slavishly.” ...
The Peking Review reports reveal scientific innovation during the Cultural Revolution as not fully interrupted. Universities shut down and academic research came to a halt, but state-protected science related to defense and national prestige continued. Innovation continued, but it was primarily related to production in an Edison manner of tinkering, rather than broad based theoretical exploration, due to insufficient resources and substandard facilities.
Inquiry into the physics of relativity and the science of genetics took major hits from interruption of funding and ignorant harassment, but the mass line proved to have benefits in areas where millions of field assistants could be mobilized, such as seismology and weather monitoring.
Future decades would witness a gap between science and talent among professionals, due to the “dead weight” of the poorly prepared Cultural Revolution generation; however, the truly talented overcame the loss of time to become productive after the years of turmoil.
On the positive side millions of rural peasants gained access to science and technology for the first time. Despite the general disaster of the Cultural Revolution, it may be argued that, in some ways, Chairman Mao’s science policy did have benefits to scientific innovation and that the mass line emerged better prepared to meet a technological future in the final decades of the twentieth century.
Havard China scholar Roderick MacFarquhar opined: "What Mao accomplished between 1949 and 1956 was in fact the fastest, most extensive, and least damaging socialist revolution carried out in any communist state." ...
Mao's writings on military strategy continue to commnd influence among insurgency leaders and anti-insurgency experts, particularly on guerrilla warfare, at which Mao is popularly regarded as a genius on the level of Sunzi (孙子).
After 30 years of reform, the Chinese economy is visibly infested with glaring inequality in income and wealth, and the means of production have been increasingly privatized under the control of a minority financial elite for its own benefit. The CPC now officially represents all the peoples, including capitalists, rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat. All this is officially accepted in the name of modernization and following global neoliberal trends.
Yet in 1919, the anti-imperialist socialist revolutionary movement in China had been launched to reverse global imperialist trends, not to follow them. At any rate, these global trends of capitalist free market fundamentalism had been halted abruptly since 2007 with the global collapse of finance capitalism, the recovery of which is by no means certain in the foreseeable future. The options available to the world now are whether state capitalism or socialism will end up as the legitimate replacement of finance capitalism.
The revolutionary momentum of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been put on hold since 1978 as socialist market economy was promoted by the Party leadership as a deliberate policy of ideological compromise, presumably to allow evolutionary dialectics towards socialism to work itself out in due time.
There is a rising danger that even the normal pace of dialectic evolution from capitalism toward socialism has been deliberately slowed down by this compromised policy. Deng’s famous dictum of letting some people get rich first along the path to national prosperity had gradually been changed by quietly dropping the word “first”. China is now a country in which some people can get super rich before others permanently. Forbes Magazine annually publishes a list of China’s richest.
Ironically, the socialist revolution that had been started by the 1911 May Fourth student movement had been torpedoed by a misguided counterrevolutionary interpretation of the student demonstration of 1989, both having taken place at Tiananmen but 78 years apart. Since 1987, under intense international pressure in reaction to the Chinese government's handling the of Tiananmen incidence, Deng’s "open and reform" policy has been forced by geopolitics to take shift from a NEP-type transitional economic strategy to kick-start modernization, to a permanent policy contaminated with dubious neoliberal dimensions to appease geopolitical pressure from the US whose markets were deemed indispensable for an overgrown Chinese export sector financed mostly by foreign capital and benefited mostly foreign investors, at the expense of Chinese workers who will be condemned to low wages unnecessarily longer.
Yet with the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2007, ample evidence now exists to show that the economic achievements in China came not from unregulated markets opened to neo-imperialism, but from the fact that Communist Party of China has wisely and fortunately retained essential control of its socialist market economy by limiting the actual opening up of the economy to foreign capital and by slowing the privatization of state-owned enterprises, in contrast to what Russia had done following US shock treatment advice. Most importantly, China has managed to insulate its financial sector from the wild turmoil of global markets since 2007 because it resisted both internal and external pressure to fully open and deregulate its own financial sector and to make its currency free floating and fully convertible.

In the final analysis, Chinese Communist Party leaders would do well if they would follow the advice urged on their predecessors in 1944 by Mao Zedong: Serve the People (为人民服务).

Written for The First Annual Conference on Mao Zedong - January 1, 2013.

高華：當代中國史史料的若干問題

高華：當代中國史史料的若干問題2011年12月27日眾所周知，史料是史學研究的基礎。在談當代中國史史料之前，需要先簡要地解釋一下什麼是當代中國史，也就是當代中國史研究的對像是什麼。所謂“當代中國史”是指1949年以後的中國歷史。 1949年後中共成為執政黨，故而“當代中國史研究”要探討在中國共產黨主導下的中國社會的各個方面，誠然，1949年後，由中央體現的黨與國家是社會的主導方面，但是主導方面並不就是一切，還有被主導的方面，也應是當代中國史的的研究對象--1949年後中國的地方，基層，人民生活，理所當然也應在研究的視野之內。“當代中國史研究”與“中華人民共和國史”有明顯的區別：“國史”以政治為主線，在研究對象方面，更側重於上層政治層面；“當代中國史研究”的研究範圍較為寬廣，對社會的主導方面和被主導方面持一視同仁的態度，在研究方法上，可以較多地吸取社會科學多種學科的資源，較少受到意識形態的限制，研究的範圍相對較寬。研究當代中國史有若干困難。以中國傳統而言，“當代人不修當代史”是一個約定束成的習慣。從大的方面講，這是中國歷史上的文化專制主義的深厚影響；在另一個方面講，當代人研究當代歷史確實存在著資料、研究者的主觀價值判斷、利益關係的牽制等諸多難以逾越的限制。然而1840年後，“當代人不研究當代史”的傳統被打破，魏源等首開先河，研究本朝史。民國以後，社會自由度大大提高，李劍農的名著《辛亥後三十年中國政治史》，即是當代人修當代史的典範。1949年中華人民共和國成立後，在相當長的時間內，修當代史提不上議事日程。這主要的原因是，執政黨有一個高度統一的意識形態，已經提供了對歷史、現實和未來的全部解釋，形成了對全體社會成員，包括對歷史研究者的統一的認識和敘述的要求。這種統一性的認識和敘述規範以“大敘述”、“大概念”為基本框架，在其指導下，再輔之以簡明化的材料，以凸顯“歷史的鐵的邏輯演進規律”，其特點是高屋見瓴，以點帶面；不足之處在於：易忽略差異性和歷史面相的多重性。當然，對某些正在發生和不久前發生的事實，人們的認識需要一個沉澱的過程而不宜過早定論，也是其中的一個原因。1978年鄧小平領導改革開放，中國的經濟和社會生活等諸方面都發生了巨大的變化，在“大敘述”、“大概念”繼續佔據主導地位的同時，更具多元性的新敘述概念從兩個方面被發掘、引入到歷史研究領域，這就是被中斷數十年的中國史學中的私人著述傳統，以及強調作者自主性的西方歷史研究理論，隨著新敘述概念越來越被人們接受，故而當代人寫當代史已成為可能。另一個更重要方面的變化是，黨和國家為了總結建國後的歷史經驗，進一步配合和推動改革開放，由官方機構在80年代陸續整理出版了許多重要文獻，從而為研究提供了基本條件。由於建國後的歷史全面深切影響到億萬百姓的生活和命運，社會各界對探討當代中國史的一些問題一直抱有濃厚的興趣，坊間也隨之出現了大量有關1949年後的各類出版物，外國相關研究也被逐步介紹到中國。總之，社會有需要，也具備了研究的初步條件，故而當代人可以研究當代歷史。當代人研究當代歷史，雖然存在著某些客觀限制，但也有諸多便利條件，例如距今時代較近，研究者對研究對象可保持較鮮活的個人感受；在資料蒐集方面，也因距今不遠而較為方便。這就進入到我今天要講的主題，我將側重講具體的史料問題。對有關歷史認識問題，也會附帶提到一、 檔案極其重要，但開放限制很多；地方檔案可資利用。如何看待建國後的檔案。檔案是研究的第一手資料，最為寶貴和重要。但是由於眾所周知的原因，建國後檔案開放的步伐十分緩慢。 1987年9月5日，中國人大常委會通過了《中華人民共和國檔案法》。 《檔案法》規定，從1988年1月1日起，開放1949年以後的3類檔案：清代檔案，民國檔案和中共檔案。同時規定，1949年以後的檔案從形成之日起，滿30年分期分批開放。所謂“形成之日”，即省以上檔案保留20年，移送檔案館；省以下機關檔案保留10年，移送檔案館。檔案被編成捲宗，移送檔案館之日謂之為“形成之日”。1990年10月，中國又制定了《中華人民共和國檔案法實施方法》，對開放檔案的步驟、方法做了說明，指出:涉及重大政治問題的檔案，可以分期開放或控制使用。 1991年中國國家檔案局更進一步對開放檔案的種類作出明確的規定，凡涉及國防、外交、公安、國家安全以及“其他到期予以開放有可能對國家利益造成損害的檔案，其向社會開放的時間可以延長到形成之日起滿50年，滿50年開放仍然有可能對國家利益造成損害的，還可繼續延期開放。”這些都是有關查閱檔案方面的一些具體的限制。由此可知，雖然《檔案法》頒布已十多年，但建國後中央級的檔案的查閱仍有非常多的限制，相比之下，省以下地方檔案館的查閱限制較少。近年來，一些學者利用地方檔案，寫出了很有分量的歷史論著。我的研究生也利用地方檔案，完成他們的畢業論文。80年代後，有關部門整理、出版了一些黨和國家歷史的檔案資料集和專題文獻集，但種類、數量皆不多。 《黨的文獻》雜誌有時會刊登一些檔案，但發表的起因多為配合黨和國家一些重要的政治舉措，例如：強調科技對四化的重要性，就配合發布毛、劉、周等的相關論述，該雜誌所刊檔案的編輯指導色彩較為濃厚，當然，能發表一點，總是比秘而不宣，藏之密閣好。顯而易見，原始檔案對於研究者是極為重要的，但對其也應具體分析，不應盲目。A. 因為1949年後的檔案的背景極為特殊，幾十年不間斷的政治運動對檔案的形成、檔案的內容都有極大的影響。例如：許多幹部的交代、反省，並非出自自願。 《顧準自述》一書是根據類似於檔案的原始文件而編輯出版的，均為顧准在文革期間的交代材料，全為自誣之詞。該書雖包含不少事實部分，但需認真剝離。B. 因某種特殊原因，有些重要活動、重要事件並無檔案記載。例如：50年代中後期以來，特別是60年代初、中期，毛澤東召開的中央常委會，有些甚至無記錄。其原因：毛對記錄一事持高度警惕，防範有人在其身後搞所謂赫魯曉夫似的“黑報告”，1961年的所謂“竊聽器事件”。C. 還有其它一些情況。所以，應該高度重視檔案，同時也應對檔案進行鑑別和分析。陳伯達晚年講過一句話：如果檔案一切皆可信，那還需要歷史學乾什麼？此話是正確的。檔案是極其重要的，但鑑別，分析更為重要。我覺得毛澤東在《實踐論》中講的一段話，對如何鑑別、運用檔案也是有用的。這就是“去粗存精、去偽存真、由此及彼，由表及里”，這是正確的思維和研究方法。

 二、 應高度重視蘇聯解秘檔案的價值九十年代初蘇聯解體後，俄羅斯政府開始大量解秘前蘇聯檔案。世界各國學者紛紛前往莫斯科，與俄方接洽，購買這些珍貴的史料。北京的歷史研究者沈志華先生投入大量財力，購買了一批極為珍貴的蘇聯史和中蘇關係史檔案，並組織翻譯，已全部譯成中文。這些檔案中的蘇聯史部分幾經周折，終於在最近由北京社會科學文獻出版社內部出版。全套書共34卷凡36本，將大大改變我們以往對蘇維埃十月革命後八十年曆史的認識。有關中蘇關係史的蘇聯解秘檔案由於各種複雜因素的影響，目前尚不具備公開出版的條件。沈志華先生已將其中的一部分，分別贈送給國內的少數研究者。這批檔案得到學者們的高度重視。這是因為：1. 蘇聯是20世紀對中國、對中共影響最為深遠的國家。中蘇兩黨、兩國的交往覆蓋了1949年後中國歷史的大部分。蘇聯解秘檔案中的中蘇關係部分，較多反映兩黨兩國的上層來往，也兼及中國的政治、經濟、軍事，思想、文化等廣泛領域。 2. 這些檔案都是原件。 3. 在中國方面沒有全面開放檔案的條件下，蘇聯解秘檔案的公佈將對認識1949年後的中國、中蘇關係有重要幫助。 4. 在一定程度上沖擊了中國傳統單一化的對歷史的敘述，以致於中國社科院近代史研究所的學者說，若干年後，長期流行的那種敘述將會被改寫。沈志華先生利用蘇聯解秘檔案和其他資料，纂寫了兩部有關朝鮮戰爭的著作--在香港出版的《斯大林、毛澤東和韓戰》、《朝鮮戰爭爆發的歷史真相》。沈也在國內出版了一本論文集《中蘇同盟與朝鮮戰爭研究》。他最近寫的《蘇聯專家在中國》，對研究蘇聯對華經濟援助問題有重要的價值。近年來，我有機會讀了一批蘇聯解秘檔案，時間跨度為二戰勝利至七十年代。這批檔案涉及面很廣，反映了許多極重要的問題。這還僅是解秘檔案中的一部分，相信若干年後，這些檔案會以各種形式向社會公開。當然，當代中國史並不就是中蘇關係史，蘇聯解密檔案主要涉及中蘇領導的上層交往和國際共運的分歧，以及五十年代的中蘇經濟聯繫。有關中國內部更複雜的情況，還有待中國學者對中國各種​​材料進行分析。我有一個看法，這就是在某種意義上說，蘇聯對中國的影響只限於製度框架上，致於中國製度的運作方式，毛的決策對中國政治，經濟，意識形態的型塑作用，對國人生活狀態的全面的支配，是任何外來影響，包括蘇聯的影響，都無法與之相比的三、 使用領導人文獻集、年譜應注意的問題80年代以來，中國陸續出版了一批老一代革命家的文集，專題文集以及年譜等文獻資料。計有《建國以來毛澤東文稿》、《毛澤東文集》、《毛澤東軍事文集》、《毛澤東外交文選》、《建國以來劉少奇文稿》、《劉少奇選集》、《周恩來選集》、《周恩來軍事選集》、《周恩來外交文選》〉、《朱德選集》、《鄧小平文選》、《陳雲文選》、《葉劍英文選》、《習仲勳文選》、《張聞天文集》、《王稼祥文集》、《彭真文集》、《陸定一文集》、《李維漢選集》、《萬里文集》、《陶鑄文集》、《董必武文集》、《鄧穎超文集》、《廖承志文集》、《胡喬木文集》、《鄧力群文集》等等。這些文集都有重要的價值，提供了一種基本資料和基本線索，但它們也有局限，即相關研究不能僅憑這些文集作唯一重要的資料。1. 對政治人物，不僅要看其言，更要觀其行。因為他們都不是單純的思想型或學院型的人物。他們的文字有時只是黨用他們個人的名義發表。有些文字並不完全表示他們的真實思想。例如，1965年，用林彪名義發表的〈人民戰爭勝利萬歲〉，反映的的是當時毛和中國黨對一系列重大問題的基本觀點。毛說過，他曾違心的寫過一些頌揚斯大林的文章。所以，僅憑政治人物的文字作為研究的材料，所得的結論是會有偏差的。最近我與東京大學教授近藤邦康交流，他是一位嚴肅的學者，他主要研究毛以及毛澤東思想。但是他的研究特點是將毛的活動與思想剝離開來，僅根據毛的文字，就其思想展開他的敘述。他用兩個概念：一個是毛的理想主義，一個是毛的現實主義，再用這兩個概念貫穿毛一生的思想和革命實踐，將其一網打盡。國內也有學者是類似的情況，主要依據毛的文集，用兩個概念，“理想主義”和“現實主義”，來研究1949年後的毛和他領導下的中國的三十年，將30年的複雜性全部消解，使之平面化。2. 政治人物的文集都為以後所編，其中有一些表述是根據以後的情況而加以修潤的，並非完全意義上的歷史原件，這種情況和毛在建國後修改《毛澤東選集》雷同。因此，使用這類文集，要謹慎、小心，需注意考辯、核查。下面稍微談一些對毛有關文集的解讀問題。除了上面談的毛的不同文集，文革期間紅衛兵編輯的《毛澤東思想萬歲》也很有價值。其中所收入的毛的講話除個別外，大多未編入大陸出版的毛的各種文集中，其真實性基本可靠。毛的各種文集都極為重要，因毛澤東在長達幾十年間是中國的絕對主宰，其思想、態度決定黨和國家的所有重要方面，即李慎之所言，30年天天寫的是毛，說的是毛。毛極複雜，須透過文字才能看清底蘊，這需要功力，一種穿透毛的語言壁壘的能力。最近二十年也出版了一些領導人的年譜，即有《毛澤東年譜》（1949年以前部分）周恩來、劉少奇、朱德、陳雲、陳毅、聶榮臻、賀龍等年譜。領導人年譜的重要性：1. 詳盡。逐年、逐月反映傳主的活動、言論；2. 年譜的編寫一般都使用了大量的檔案資料，甚至政治局會議記錄；3. 編寫年譜的單位具有較高的權威性，如中央文獻研究室等。近十年出版的領導人年譜還有一些重要的特點，這就是有較多的取捨和省略，並非有事必錄，如文革中周恩來的活動有大量地省略，對涉及敏感問題，都迴避了。

 四、 研究文革史的重要的資料：​​《中國文化大革命文庫光碟》。文革的歷史曾經牽動億萬中國人命運，對它的研究已經是一個專門的學科，吸引了許多中外學者。但是，有關文革史的研究又是極為困難的，大批的資料未得開放，更無從提供給學者自由使用。為了總結歷史教訓，同時也是推動這門學科的發展，美國狄金森學院研究員宋永毅等八位華裔學者和香港中文大學中國研究服務中心合作，歷經各種困難，在大陸、香港、台灣學者的支持下，遍訪世界各主要圖書館，蒐集、徵集了大量的文革資料和眾多的私人收藏，並對這些材料進行了編輯校勘，即將由香港中文大學中國研究服務中心出版發行《中國文化大革命文庫光碟》 。這是迄今為止，全世界範圍內收藏文革資料，最豐富的一套文庫，有近三千萬字的容量。文庫共有七個組成部分：第一部分，有關文革的中央文件等；第二部分；毛澤東關於文革的講話，指示等；第三部分；林彪關於文革的講話，指示等；第四部分；周恩來等中央首長關於文革的講話，指示；第五；有關文革的重要報刊社論等；第六；紅衛兵，群眾運動的重要文獻；第七部分；文革中的異端思潮重要文獻。這套文庫還配有一本中英文索引，對所收的每一篇文獻都例有中英文的篇目。除此之外，光盤可按“作者”，“標題”，“時間”，“主題檢索”，“分主題檢索”，“發文機構檢索”等查閱。五、 從地方志、回憶錄、口述史料觀察社會的基層。過往的研究只注意上層的決策和政策的形成，對地方、基層關注很少。地方、基層，更真實的反映社會的真貌和全貌。中國幅員遼闊，人口眾多，即有同一性，更有差異性。更重要的是，通過對地方、基層的觀察，能反映民眾的生存狀態。中國歷代都有修志的傳統，民國以後因戰亂，修志傳統中斷，但亦有不少地區修志。十一屆三中全會後開始，“盛世修志”。中央有地方志指導委員會（結構鬆散），省、市、縣政府設立地方志辦公室。近二十年後，出版了大量的省、市、縣、鎮志。它們都是根據當地政府的檔案編纂而成的，對了解該地方的一般情況十分有用。香港中文大學中國研究服務中心收藏有極為豐富的近二十年出版的各類地方志和專業志。專業志和大型叢書也是重要的資料來源。專業志十分重要，全面反映了某一地區某一行業的發展情況，如江蘇林業志、水利志、鋼鐵志、糧食志、人口誌等，價值較高，一般都較真實。《當代中國叢書》是1985年前後由胡喬木、鄧力群發起編寫。 《當代中國》的地方卷，每省一卷，1949-1985年。中央級的行業志，如中國的氣象、中國的農機等等，以經濟發展為主，已出版20卷（絕大部分行業）。雖有宣傳色彩，但提供了基本情況。近年來，廣州中山大學李若健教授利用地方志，研究1958-1961年的社會動盪和社會控制，有較高的學術價值。回憶錄是一種重要的史料，但又是一種較為特殊的史料。研究者運用這類史料時需加以特別的注意。建國以來，回憶錄出版有兩個階段：1949-1979；1979至今。關於第一階段，出版的個人回憶錄較少，多為短篇的革命回憶文章。因受政治環境影響的絕對支配，有些回憶錄的真實性和準確性存有問題。在這一階段，出版了兩套大型的回憶錄：《紅旗飄飄》和《星火燎原》。 1962年下半年，黨內生態環境急劇惡化，革命回憶錄的撰寫基本中斷。 “王超北事件”和小說《劉志丹》事件。 1964年後，有關劉少奇的回憶文章較多出現。出版回憶錄的個人一般是重要的領導同誌或革命前輩。吳玉章關於辛亥革命的回憶錄，請李新同志幫忙。陶承《我的一家》和吳運鐸的《把一切獻給黨》都是由何家棟執筆。朱德在1963年想寫回憶錄，找康生。毛知道後，表示不贊成，此事告吹。文革中被突出宣傳的的少量回憶錄完全是為了配合政治鬥爭的需要。如：楊成武《林總教我做師長》、鐘赤兵《跟隨林總的日子》。50-70年代，由於中國的史料不開放，西方研究中國革命的歷史，十分重視這類回憶錄，但那個時期的西方中國學剛起步不久，所以他們的論著存在著較多的史實錯誤。如《星火燎原》中有一篇回憶錄，稱1933年毛澤東、王明、博古在江西瑞金檢閱紅軍，以訛傳訛，連西人的論著也都跟著說王明曾從蘇聯返回，再回蘇京，以至王明事後專門澄清。在毛時代，寫回憶錄是一件高危險的事情。毛和康生：“利用小說反黨是一大發明”， 1962年下半年，以李建彤的《劉志丹》為突破口，將習仲勳、賈拓夫等一批西北同志打成反黨集團。

 十一屆三中全會以後，情況發生重大變化。1. 黨的實事求是方針的恢復；2. 鄧小平、胡耀邦的態度，搶救史料；3. 也有高級領導同志表示：將帶秘密去見馬克思從80年代至今，大批回憶錄問世。涉及中國革命、建國後歷史的各個方面，成為研究當代中國的重要史料，但使用時須小心，應進行鑑別。1. 時間久遠，記憶模糊，存在技術性方面的誤差；2. 主人公受自我認識方面的局限，即作者的主觀性是否有節制的問題，即有意迴避自己的過失，或誇大自己的功績；3. 亦有人借寫回憶錄泄私憤。所以應參照其他資料，對回憶錄進行考辯。儘管如此，回憶錄仍不失為重要史料。因為它提供了較生動的背景資料。近二十年來，所出版的大量回憶錄，可大致分為幾類：1. 黨和國家領導人的回憶錄；2. 軍隊高級領導人的回憶錄；3. 地方領導人的回憶錄；4. 有關外交問題的回憶錄；5. 某些當事人就重大歷史事件纂寫的回憶錄；6. 新聞出版界負責人的回憶錄；7. 知識分子和文化名人的回憶錄；8. 重要歷史人物家屬的回憶錄；9. 與中國關係密切的外國人的回憶錄；10. 在美國和西方的中國人的回憶錄；從重要歷史人物和重大歷史事件角度纂寫的回憶錄也有下列幾類：1. 有關當事人對毛澤東、周恩來、劉少奇等的回憶錄；2. 有關胡風事件的回憶錄；3. 有關“反右運動”的回憶錄；4. 有關“大躍進”和“反右傾運動”的回憶錄；5. 有關文革的回憶錄；6. 有關五十年代幾所著名高校大學生生活的回憶錄；上述這些回憶錄大多集中於政治人物和文化名人，山西人民出版社近年出版的宋雲斌先生在1949以後的30年的日記，出版社給它起了個比較通俗的名字，叫《紅塵冷眼》，其實就是一個知識分子在毛時代的命運。宋雲斌先生是浙江省的一個著名的知識分子，也是民主同盟過去的一個高級領導人，1957年被打成右派。他是一個很重要的學者，他的日記提供了一份對那個時代很寶貴的個人的敘述。政治人物和文化界名人的相關回憶肯定有其重要的價值，但從這類材料中較少看到普通人和底層民眾的生活。九十年代中期後，這種情況有所改變，《天涯》雜誌最先開闢了“民間語文”的欄目，陸續刊登了一些普通人的口述材料或當年的文獻資料。 《光明日報》出版社出版了《民間書信》，長江文藝出版社出版了《中國底層訪談錄》，作家出版社1998年出版了一本名為《一個平民百姓的回憶錄》。據我所知，近年來一些普通人都在纂寫他們的回憶錄，香港中文大學中國研究服務中心就收有一本《50--70年代基層政治運動記實》的個人回憶錄，作者蕭牧，1949年是一個21歲的青年，聽信去台灣可讀台大的宣傳，和同窗好友胡里胡塗去了台灣，很快又因思家返回大陸的家鄉，從此一輩子在基層被整，被鬥，那個當年和他一起去台灣的好友，幾十年後成了台灣的名詩人洛夫。蕭牧的回憶錄沒有出版，是自印本，對了解、研究建國後基層一系列重要問題都具有參考價值。我認為研究者應高度重視普通人的回憶錄，我一直有這樣一種看法，我們在研究當代中國史，研究毛的時候，應該重視，考慮普通民眾在那個時代的生活和感受的問題。這個方面是我們過去忽略的，不重視的。當然對那個時代，不會有統一的看法，正是在這種差異中，我們可以觀察到歷史的複雜性。費爾巴哈說過： “經常受到世界史浪潮衝擊的往往是那些最普通的人，而絕不是那些高官顯爵，因為他們高高在上，太顯赫了。”我想普通人的生活經驗和感受是非常重要的，我們不僅要重視知識分子的感受和經驗，也要重視普羅大眾的經驗和感受。歷史學是一門關於人的學問，人民的生活，人民的生存狀態，應永遠在我們研究者的關懷的視野之內。也許這樣，我們才可能對過往的歷史，比過去有一個新的角度，有一個更全面的認識，因為他們組成我們社會的最大多數，他們所處的地位、環境更能我們了解到歷史的多重面相。結語綜上所述，當代史的資料有它的特殊性：一方面許多關鍵性的資料十分缺少，檔案的開放步伐很慢；另一方面由於研究的對象距今不遠，有關資料既多又雜。從資料的情況上講，對當代史進行研究的基本條件已具備，國外和海外對中國的研究也越來越集中於1949年以後的中國，因為這是離當下不遠的時代，對認識今天和未來的作用更大。對當代史的資料需要小心鑑別和判斷，需要史識的修養和眼光；同時也需要研究者俱備歷史學的基本功底，即真正能夠讀懂這些語意曾被膨脹或修飾的浩如煙海的史料。