Xie Maosong on the CCP as a New Civilization

 Xie Maosong, “The Chinese Communist Party is a New Civilization”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Xie Maosong is a senior researcher at the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an academic adviser of the Indian Ocean Island Research Center at the South China University of Technology.  I first heard of Xie when talking with New York Times reporter Chris Buckley a week or two ago about recent intellectual trends in China, and decided to get to know him better.
 
Although I have not spent a great deal of time with his work, Xie appears to be an establishment intellectual who, like Zhang Weiwei, identifies more with Party-State propaganda than is the case of most of the establishment intellectuals whose work I discuss on my site.  As I have explained before, I do not deal much with propaganda, not because it is not important, but because Xi Jinping Thought and the People’s Daily already get a lot of attention, while the people I work on do not. 
 
From time to time, however, I like to dip my toe into the vast river of propaganda that flows through China, reminding myself (and my readers) that some Chinese establishment intellectuals embrace the Party-State wholeheartedly.  Indeed, the kind of “argument” Xie develops in the text translated here has been building to a crescendo over the past few months as the system gears up to celebrate the renewal of Xi Jinping’s mandate of heaven next month, his third (fun fact:  “never two without three” is, in most Romance languages, the equivalent of “when it rains, it pours” in English).
 
I confess that I am at a loss for what to say about a piece entitled “The Chinese Communist Party is New Civilization.”  It appears that I am not alone; several online comments that followed the publication of Xie’s piece wondered if the statement was “grammatically correct.”  I think Xie’s grammar is okay, but still find equating a political party—even a massive, historical, arguably quite successful political party like the CCP—with a civilization to be grandiose and meaningless.  What Xie means of course is that the CCP has managed to combine the glories and wisdom of Chinese traditional civilization with its unique sinicization of Marxism and hence to tackle the challenges of modernity in such a way as to lead the world to ever greater triumphs.  But still, a new civilization?  I suppose that the CCP does, in some sense, have its own unique language, religion, and rituals, its art, music, and artefacts.  It certainly has its own unique history.  Putting together a “museum of the civilization of the Chinese Communist Party” could, I suppose, be a rewarding undertaking, and perhaps it is already underway.
 
In many ways, of course, Xie is saying nothing new at all.  Essays on the uniqueness of China’s continuous civilization are a dime a dozen, and the CCP has been engaged in a selective appropriation of Chinese tradition for quite some time as part of an effort to fashion a new legitimacy in the post-Mao era.   It can be a valuable, intellectually serious undertaking to try to understand how much contemporary China owes to its past, or what parts of its past it should pay more attention to. 
 
To my mind, however, Xie’s text stands out because it simply asserts, and does not argue.  I may disagree with thinkers like Jiang Shigong, who says similar things about the overlap between Xi Jinping Thought and Neoconfucianism, but I can follow his argument and understand how he is trying to sway his peers.  By contrast, Xie is preaching to the choir in a way that I find pretentious and, frankly, lazy.  Although then again, if he offers no argument perhaps I can mount no rebuttal.            
 
I particularly enjoyed one online comment Xie’s piece provoked from a Chinese reader, which I quote at length:

“If there is anyone who does not understand what ‘historical nihilism’ is [this term is generally employed by Party loyalists to condemn anyone who questions the Party view of history], it would not hurt to read this text.  If there is anyone who cannot judge the urgency and necessity of General Secretary Xi's assertion that we must ‘establish a correct view of Party history,’ they might want to read this text.  Because what reading this text leads people to think about, is not the ‘Chinese Communist Party’ and its glorious century-long history, but instead that the greatness, glory, and correctness of the Party are completely attributable to ‘Confucianism’ and ‘Confucian studies.’  If this is indeed the case…it would mean that the entirety of the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party has become, through the ‘research’ carried out by certain Party experts, an imperial tool celebrating the ethical virtues of the ‘three obediences and the four virtues!’  Was history really thus?  This is a genuine question that we must confront in the face of the huge fact of the Party’s centenary, as well as a basic issue on which all Chinese Communist Party members should express themselves today.” 
 
Indeed.
 
Translation 
 
Transcending “Political Parties” and Offering a New Interpretation of the Chinese Communist Party from the Perspective of “Civilization:”  The Chinese Communist Party is a New Civilization 
 
The year 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  Since its inception, the CCP has maintained the tradition of consciously summarizing its historical achievements and failures, especially at each important historical turning point.  An important part of the 2021 historical summary of this century-old great party will consist of a self-conscious sorting out of the new political tradition the Party has created, and will especially include a comprehensive reassessment of its system of regulations and institutions.  At the same time, the question of the cultivation of the Party's political culture, which is related to long-term stability, will also be taken up in an even more self conscious manner. 
 
In a deeper and longer-term sense, it is necessary to finally grasp that the CCP is not a political party in the simple sense of the word, and that the CCP transcends the simple numerical distinction between single-party and multi-party systems based on the Western historical experience, and thus has civilizational significance. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party should be understood as a new form of civilization. 
 
Faced with the invasion of the Western powers and the aggressiveness of Western civilization supporting the invasion, modern China faced a triple dilemma at the levels of civilization, nation, and society.  Solving the civilizational dilemma required first solving the national dilemma, and then the social dilemma, after which the civilizational dilemma could finally be solved.
 
The CCP-led Chinese revolution had a dual revolutionary nature, opposing imperialism externally and feudalism internally, and the victory of the People's War of Liberation led to the unification of the country and the resolution of the national dilemma. The Chinese revolution and the People's War of Liberation simultaneously carried out a social revolution by effecting a broad mobilization of society. 
 
The founding of New China established a socialist system. Building the country required solving social problems in order to resolve social dilemmas, and the first thirty years of reform and opening up have completely resolved any remaining class problems. 
 
Following reform and opening, China now has both rich and poor people, but classes no longer have power. Although China has opened up its finances, it will not let capital get out of control, because should it do this, China would inevitably become a society like that of the United States, having taken the American capitalist road; nor will China let domestic capital become a comprador for transnational capital, because the risk here is that China might become the old China in substance and structure. China under the leadership of the CCP must maintain the nature of the socialist state, which is why China under the leadership of the CCP has Marxism as its guiding ideology. Marx’s target was the basic logical structure of capitalism, so the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics pioneered by the CCP is consistently guided by Marxist logic, but in practice also always has a Chinese character. 
 
The Chinese path, i.e., the path of Chinese socialism, did not appear out of nowhere; it is the result of inheriting and linking together each chapter of Chinese civilization, and has had to inherit and link together four historical periods:  first it had to grasp the continuity of the two 30-year periods before and after reform and opening. 
 
Second, it had to grasp the continuity between the Chinese path and the Chinese revolution led by the CCP. 
 
Third, it had to link the Chinese path to modern Chinese history. The Chinese nation faced the invasion of Western imperialist powers in modern times and was reduced to a semi-colonial and a semi-feudal society. Only a thorough-going anti-imperialist and anti-feudal stance could bring the Chinese nation to independence and unity, rejuvenating the Chinese nation and liberating the people, so anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism became the main axis of the Chinese Revolution and modern Chinese history. 
 
Fourth, it had to link the Chinese path to the history of China’s more than 5,000 years of civilization.  This linkage is implicitly reflected in both the cultural values and the "spirit" and "essence" of the system. 
 
The Chinese path, that is, the continuity between the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the four historical stages of the history of Chinese civilization, is precisely where we see the "Chinese characteristics" of the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and is also precisely where we see how Marx has been “sinicized.” The path of socialism with Chinese characteristics is a historical and logical development of a Chinese civilization that has been continuously connected for more than 5,000 years. 
 
When the Chinese Communist Party leads the Chinese people to finally achieve comprehensive modernization in a Chinese socialist way, and at the same time solves all the problems of modernization through socialism, the Chinese Communist Party and the people will unite as one and take the socialist road, eventually creating a new civilization, which will represent the transcendence of the civilizational dilemma of modernity. The civilizational, national, and social dilemmas that China has confronted in modern times will at this point be completely resolved, and the new civilization of the Chinese Communist Party will replace the Western civilization of the past five hundred years and create a new civilizational imaginary which will reign for the next five hundred years, or even the next millennium.
  
What the Continuity of Chinese Civilization and the Completion of Modernity Mean to National Politics and Grassroots Society 
 
1. In terms of the oneness of the continuity and renewal of Chinese civilization, the People's Republic of China established by the CCP and the Chinese socialist path it has taken represent the modern completion of the great unity of Chinese civilization at the national and political levels. 
 
In the West, the politics of city-states and small kingdoms was the norm, whereas in China, the "great unity" of the politics of large countries was the norm. The politics of great powers pursue not only greatness, but also the “Way of longevity.” Combining greatness and longevity produces the “Way of greatness and longevity,” which is where we find the “Way” of Chinese civilization as the only continuous and unbroken civilization in the history of the world that has remained loyal to its native path.
 
Traditional China represented the great unity of an agricultural civilization. With the founding of New China, the industrial technology of industrial civilization greatly expanded China's great unity, and the digital technology of the new digital civilization has expanded China's great unity even further.  Both of these were fully organized and mobilized by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. 
 
2. The "mass line" of the CCP at the social and grassroots levels refers not only to acts of organization and mobilization carried out by a modern political party, but should also be seen as the modern completion of the moral awareness and moral consciousness brought about by the "popularization of ritual teachings" underway since the Ming and Qing dynasties. The "popularization of ritual teachings" is a “heavenly principle” of ritual teachings emphasized by Song-Ming Neoconfucians, referring to the internalization of the innate knowledge of the good and the moral awakening of the heart.  This awakening gradually moved from elite scholars to the common people.  From a long-term historical perspective, the downward shift of rites and teachings was also a response to post-Song changes in Chinese society, as China evolved from an aristocratic society composed of great families to a mass society. The selection of elites in mass society was carried out through the imperial examinations, and following the Yuan period, the Four Books rose to the same level of importance as the Five Classics, and Zhu Xi's Collection of Commentaries on the Four Books became the standard textbook for the imperial examinations. 
 
The Four Books, and especially the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, are far simpler and easier to grasp than the Five Classics, which are complex and take years to master.   At the same time, the Four Books also "make their greater vision clear"[2] in their directness and simplicity, so that they "start low and aim high,"[3] “illuminating illustrious virtue”[4] and “resting in the highest excellence.”[5]  The relative simplicity of the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean spoke to the middle class of China’s mass society. The popularization of ritual teachings during the Ming and Qing dynasties simplified and popularized the teachings of the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean even further. 
 
As a form of civilization, the Chinese Communist Party should be regarded as the Chinese civilization that accepted the impact and challenge of modernization, rapidly carried out industrialization in the process of learning from this challenge, and, making use of modern and industrialized techniques, ultimately achieving the dual expansion of the great unity and ritual self-organization of Chinese civilization at the state and social levels. The Chinese Communist Party of China is itself integrated with the great unity of Chinese civilization and the self-organization of ritual teachings. 
 
The “Comprehensive Leadership of the Party” Can only be Understood in a Civilizational Sense
 
3. The comprehensive leadership of the Party and the dialectical relationship between the Party and the government 
 
Be it the Party, the government, the army, the people, or education, be it north, south, east, or West, the Party is the leader of all things[6]; the Party plays the role of overseeing the big picture and coordinating the discrete elements. Between the Party and the government, there is a division of labor but no separation. The division of labor between the Party and the government cannot be fully explained by applying the dichotomy of politics and administration in Europe and America, and only in a civilizational sense can the dialectical relationship between Party and the government under the overall leadership of the Party be understood. The relationship between the Party and the government can be understood in a deeper way by using the traditional thinking of Chinese civilization, that yang is the master and yin is the follower, while yin and yang are both one.  Another way to understand this relationship is through the idea of unity of ideal methods and definite things, as expressed in the Book of Changes:  “Hence that which is antecedent to the material form exists, we say, as an ideal method, and that which is subsequent to the material form exists, we say, as a definite thing.”[7] 
 
What makes the Party the Party, is that Party's leadership of the country reflects the Party's purpose, especially in the realms of political, ideological and organizational leadership. The Party's policies are implemented by the government, and the policies are similarly transformed into the government’s legislation. In other words, the Party's overall leadership of the work of the government is translated into law, so that the Party's propositions become the will of the government. The Party itself is constantly improving its own internal Party regulations.
 
4. A political order in which the Party and the people are one 
 
Why is it that contemporary China has carried out one institutional reform after another, while such things rarely happen in the West? Few people look at this from an academic perspective. This is because China has traditionally been a bureaucratic system dominated by the literati, and remains largely the same today. On top of this concrete institutional arrangement, there is a more transcendent arrangement, which is the political order. 
 
Traditionally, heaven, the ruler, the ministers, and the people constituted a circular order. The ruler grounded himself in the people, but the people were also subject to the constraints of heaven, without which the temptations of pure utilitarianism might have been too strong, so above the people, there had to be a more transcendent notion of "heaven," that is, ideas concerning heavenly mandates and heavenly principles. Today, various communities of destiny, including the community of destiny of man and nature, have come together to form a new idea of "heaven" and heavenly principle, and the Party and the people make up a modern political order in which the two are a closely integrated and inseparable whole. The terms "the Chinese Communist Party” and “the Chinese people" are often linked together, showing their intrinsic unity of yin and yang.
 
5.  The Chinese Communist Party has no special interests of its own.
 
"Political parties" in the sense of those elected in West are always partial, and have their own partial interests to defend, be it the upper middle class or the lower middle class, while the CCP transcends this. On the one hand, the thorough resolution of the class issue after the founding of New China makes the Party naturally classless, and the spirit of "pursuing no personal interests and doing everything for the people" can be understood in this context. On the other hand, the CCP represents the "one" in the Song-Ming Neoconfucian notion that “pattern is one and continuous while dividing into many particulars 理一分殊,"[8] the CCP representing the overall, fundamental and long-term interests of society as a whole. 
 
6. The transcendence of democratic centralism relative to Western electoral democracy. Democratic centralism captures the dialectic of democracy and centralization and overcomes the short-sightedness of Western public opinion, the shortcoming of which is its impulsive short-sightedness and lack of attention to results.  Democratic centralism’s focus on results follows Wang Fuzhi’s 王夫之(1619-1692) interpretation of “good 善” as something that is “appropriate in all its applications 处焉而宜,” by which he meant that managing something in an appropriate manner is fully the result of having focused on objective realities.  This means that "supreme goodness 至善" is "completely suitable in all respects 皆得咸宜," or in other words that the matter has been handled in the exactly appropriate manner.  Wang also emphasized the necessity of “avoiding misapplications 不处胡宜,” meaning that a “good” that does not materialize in terms of its final outcome is not a “good.”  Wang’s profound interpretation of the “good” provides a baseline civilizational structure through which to understand democratic centralism. China's political legitimacy is a historical legitimacy grounded in historical results.[9] 
 
Democratic centralism is then combined with the mass line, allowing it to avoid both commandism and populism (lit. “tailism 尾巴主义”). 
 
7.  The Party's management of cadres and human resources is the manifestation of the Party's overall leadership in terms of the organization and selection of officials, and is based on the fundamental insight that everything is political and that politics is all about people.  The Party appointment system is different from the Western multi-party election system, and on the one hand ensures greater unity, while on the other is far more thorough and comprehensive than the Western multi-party election system’s singular focus on votes, and for this reason can select and actually use human resources based on their comprehensive performance over time.
 
8. The Party’s efforts in terms of self-supervision correspond to the Party's overall leadership. The Party has successfully solved the problem of self-supervision by exercising a thorough, comprehensive internal supervision of the Party.
  
9. The civilizational significance of the United Front. The CCP's comprehensive leadership extends outside the Party via the United Front, whose dynamic flexibility allows it to continuously bring various new groups and classes into its system of organization and mobilization.
 
The Party has Inherited from the Chinese Civilizational Tradition the Great Tradition of Integrating Politics and Religion[10]
 
10. Party-building consists essentially of building a workstyle.  
 
The Chinese Communist Party emphasizes the Party's fine traditions and workstyles, of which three are particularly important, namely, "the style of linking theory and practice, the style of being in close contact with the people, and the style of criticism and self-criticism." 
 
“To govern is to correct,”[11] and the Chinese Communist Party demands that Party discipline be stricter than national law, and that no distinction be made between private and public morality. Rectifying workstyles requires centralized campaigns, an insight based on deep understanding of human nature, and requires carrying out campaign-style educational and rectification movements from time to time.
 
11. The Party as an organism that learns: a Party that studies and Party schools at all levels. The Chinese Communist Party has a unique system of Party schools at all levels and in all sectors, the mission of which is not only the training of Party cadres, but also the more important function of unifying the Party's ideology and theory.
 
12. The Party’s spiritual character of possessing deep historical consciousness 
 
In terms of the writing of Chinese history, the Party has assumed the dual functions of political order legitimacy and civilizational consciousness. Party history and Party building as well as Sinicized Marxist theory have taken on the functions of the study of the classics and the histories in traditional Chinese civilization, establishing a new unity of classics and history under the Chinese Communist Party.
 
13. The demand that Party members and cadres be atheists is not mutually exclusive with the religious policy allowing the general public to freely practice their religion.
 
The demands that Party members and cadres practice atheism are determined by the humanistic nature of Chinese civilization. During the Wanli 万历period (1572-1620 )of the Ming Dynasty, Jiao Hong 焦纮 (1540-1620), Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568-1610), Dong Qichang 董其昌 (1555-1636) and other court officials were punished together with Li Zhi 李贽 (1527-1602) because they brought Buddhism into politics.
 
The Party also has the moral responsibility to correct the hearts and minds of the people and to promote customs for society as a whole, which carries forward the tradition of Chinese civilization that unites politics and moral instruction and transformation, which is different from the relationship between politics and religion in the West.
 
14. The Chinese Communist Party has its own epistemology as a party. Seeking truth from facts, the mass line, independence and autonomy, as well as the law of  dialectics, the theory of contradiction, and the theory of practice, which originated in Marxism but which now bear the marks of Chinese civilization due to having been sinicized.
 
15.  Party nature and the political and civilizational meaning of the spirit of the members of the CCP.  The Party nature carries forward and improves on the literati spirit, and what is different from the literati spirit is the organizational and disciplinary character of a modern political party.  The Party nature and the nature of the people achieve unity in the CCP. 
 
16. The revolutionary spirit and the spirit of struggle have become the spiritual and political character of the CCP, allowing the CCP to add a new civilizational temperament to the traditional spirit of the literati that it has carried forward from Chinese civilization. The fusion of the old and the new spirit into one, including the expression "United Front" as well as various other "fronts," are in fact an abstract inheritance of the war experience. 
 
The spirit of struggle is manifested in the courage to fight and to excel at fighting against all kinds of difficulties, obstacles, and challenges encountered in the course of daily work. The spirit of struggle also manifests itself in the internal struggle over ideological lines, and the Chinese Communist Party has achieved unity in the struggle against various erroneous lines on the left and right. 
 
Linked to the spirit of struggle is a profound grasp of contradictions, which requires not being dazzled by the complexity of a phenomenon, but rather seeing its essence, to see the internal connection of things, to seize the main contradiction, and to seize the main aspects of the contradiction. 
 
From Mao Zedong's early text, "The Power of the Heart"[12] (1917) through the “original intentions 初心”[13] of Communist Party members, from the progressive nature and purity of Party members through the spiritual genealogy of the Chinese Communists, we can see the civilized significance of the heart and spirit emphasized by the Chinese Communist Party. Mao Zedong's "The Power of the Heart:" "Of the heavens’ powers, none are greater than the sun, of the powers of the earth, none are greater than electricity, of the powers of man, none are greater than the heart.”  “When positive life-energy springs forth, it can penetrate gold or rocks.  With spirit, what cannot be achieved?” "The heart of an individual determines their life, the heart of the group determines its cause, the heart of a country determines its civilization, the heart of humanity determines its karmic results.” "The glow of a firefly can light up the sky, a single spark can light a prairie fire, overturning the heavens and the earth." In his early years, Mao Zedong emphasized understanding the essentials of Confucian humanism 大本大源, which accorded him a profound grasp on the transparent relationship between the inner nature of the mind and the outer nature of the nation and the civilization. 
 
The Party's Conscious Inheritance and Development of the Civilizational Consciousness of Chinese Civilization 
 
17. At the historical moment of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the Party will take ever greater efforts to stimulate its conscious awareness of civilization. This involves a deep understanding that Chinese civilization, as the only continuous and unbroken civilization in world history, relies fundamentally on the cohesive force of civilizational consciousness for its continuity. This is reflected in the Chinese civilizational consciousness, developed in the classics and in such works of history as A Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance 资治通鉴 (1048).  In terms of the essence of a “cultural great power,” the basic, ultimate goal is civilizational consciousness and civilizational cohesion.
  
The Communist Party of China, as a great party with a century-old history, has transcended the modern Western party system and become a civilizational model. Having achieved the conscious awareness of the CCP as a civilizational model, there is also a corresponding awareness that the roots of the Chinese path are also found in Chinese civilization. What links the Chinese path and Chinese civilization is the Way, and the Chinese path will ultimately rise to the level of a new civilizational principle of the Way. 
 
18.  The Chinese Communist Party on the relationship between China and the world. "Long live the People's Republic of China!" and "Long live the great unity of the world's people!" are intrinsically related to the spirit of Chinese civilization, which is "to rule the country and bring peace to the world." On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party insists on its national spirit of independence and autonomy, and at the same time, it carries forward the idea that "the world is one family" from Chinese civilization, which allows the Chinese Communist Party to extend its concept of common prosperity and common development to win-win sharing under globalization, which will eventually surpass the American winner-take-all mentality. 
 
Therefore, to understand China’s efforts to imagine a new future civilization, we must first deepen our understanding of the civilizational significance of the CCP, and break through the limitations of simply understanding the CCP as a political party—especially in the sense of Western political parties, because thinking in that way comes with all sorts of limitations.  Instead we must imagine the CCP as a civilization, seeing the CCP as a civilizational political party, which will itself give rise to a new civilization.   To succeed in creating this new civilization, we much understand the vitality of Chinese civilization, which is the three-fold civilizational meaning continually developed by the civilizational meaning of the Chinese Communist Party. 
 
Notes

[1]谢茂松, “中国共产党是一种新文明,” published online on 观察者网/The Observer website on March 24, 2021.

[2]Translator’s note:  The quote is from Mencius, considerably modified to fit the needs of the passage:  “Once a man chooses to stand by his greater parts, his lesser parts cannot seize him.”  See Robert Eno, Mencius, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 113. 

[3]Translator’s note:  The quote is from the Confucian Analects, considerably modified to fit the needs of the passage “In my studies, I start from below and get through to what is up above.” See D.C. Lao, The Analects, passage 14:35.

[4]Translator’s note:  The quote is from the Great Learning: “What the Great Learning teaches, is to illustrate illustrious virtue,” online translation available here.

[5]Translator’s note.  The quote is from the Great Learning: “What the Great Learning teaches, is to illustrate illustrious virtue,” online translation available here. 

[6]Translator’s note:  Mao Zedong apparently made this remark at a 1973 Politburo meeting.

[7]Translator’s note:  Online translation available here. 

[8]Translator’s note:  This idea is generally associated with Zhu Xi (1130-1200), one of the principle architects of Neoconfucianism.  For an overview of Zhu’s thought, see here, particularly section 3.1.

[9]Translator’s note:  Xie refers to Wang Fuzhi as Wang Chuanshan 王船山, which was indeed another of his names (Chuanshan means “Chuan mountain,” which is where Wang hid from the Qing government after publishing anti-Manchu writings) and the way he is referred to the title to his collected works 船山遗书全集.  Xie Maosong published a book on Wang in 2013 entitled The Way of the Minister:  The Learning of the Heart and the Unity of Principle and Potential  大臣之道：心性之学与理势合一, from which the analysis in this paragraph presumably derives.    Wang is a well known figure in both China and the West, but none of the phrases Xie uses to describe Wang’s thinking yield anything in an Internet search, which means:  1.  that Xie’s reading of Wang is either innovative, or obscure, or both (or that few Chinese intellectuals are interested in Wang Fuzhi); and 2.  that my translations are at best approximative, although I believe the basic meaning to be correct. 

[10]Translator’s note:  The word I have translated as “religion”--jiao/教—means “teachings,” and thus can refer to religion, education, or “transformation through learning.”

[11]Translator’s note:  From the Analects, see the D. C. Lau translation, passage 12:17.

[12]Translator’s note:  A Chinese version of the text, including what purport to be photographs of the original document, are available here.  An English translation, which appears somewhat problematic, is available here, but whatever the errors of translation, it does seem clear that Mao is writing in the style and language of Confucianism and Neoconfucianism, which constituted, of course, much of the basis of his formal education.

[13]Translator’s note:  The notion of “original intention,” or “not forgetting our original intentions” refers to remaining true to the original dreams of communism.  The phrase was traditionally associated with Buddhism and thus links communism with traditional Chinese civilization in a vague, fuzzy manner.