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The Great Union of the Popular Masses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Mao Tse-tung
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Extract

The decadence of the state, the sufferings of humanity, and the darkness of society have all reached an extreme. Where is the method of improvement and reform? Education, industrialization, strenuous efforts, rapid progress, destruction and construction are, to be sure, all right, but there is a basic method for carrying out all these undertakings, which is that of the great union of the popular masses.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 49 , January 1972 , pp. 76 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1972

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References

* Mao Tse-tung's article, “The great union of the popular masses” (“Min-chung ti ta lien-ho”) originally appeared in three instalments in Nos. 2, 3 and 4 of Hsiang-chiang p'ing-lun (The Hsiang River Review) dated respectively 21 and 28 July and 4 August 1919. So far as is known, no copy of this periodical is available outside China. This translation has therefore been made from a copy of the text as reprinted in Volume I of Chung-kuo kung-ch'an-tang tang-shih shih-liao chi (Collection of historical materials on the party history of the Chinese Communist Party). (This is a documentary collection compiled by the Central Higher Party School in Peking.) Those portions of this version which can be checked against photographic facsimiles of the corresponding pages of Hsiang-chiang p'ing-lun contained in secondary sources published in China reproduce faithfully the original text, and there is every reason to believe that the text as a whole is entirely reliable and correct, except for a very small number of minor typo-graphical errors. This is, of course, what one would expect in an inner-Party publication of this kind.

In the translation which follows, I have, on the whole, retained the language of the extracts contained in The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, whenever it turned out that I had accurately reconstructed the Chinese text of a given passage. There are, however, certain departures from that version, not only in cases where Mao's original text proved to have been abridged or condensed in the secondary sources from which I was working, but in cases where further reflection, or a knowledge of the context, has convinced me that my earlier rendering was not a felicitous one. In the extensive lists of names of organizations contained in the third instalment, I have used, wherever applicable, the standard English equivalents proposed in Mary C. Wright (ed.), China in Revolution: The First Phase 1900–1913 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 477–8.

1. The first instalment of this article has no sub-title; the second and third parts have sub-titles as shown below.Google Scholar

2. This slight error in dating on Mao's part may perhaps be explained by the fact that it was only in 1918 that Li Ta-chao had first written about the Russian Revolution.Google Scholar

3. Literally, “deal with that person according to his own principles” – from Chu Hsi's commentary to Chapter 13 of the Chung Yung.Google Scholar