Chapter 44 Cultural heritage should be fully and critically used[1]

(December 24, 1960) China's cultural heritage should be fully and critically utilized.China's thousands of years of culture is mainly the culture of the feudal era, but it is not all feudalism, there are people's things, and there are anti-feudal things.It is necessary to distinguish between feudal and non-feudal things.Not all feudalism is bad.We must pay attention to distinguishing the occurrence, development and demise of feudalism in different periods.When feudalism was still happening and developing, there were many things that were good about it.Nor is the culture of anti-feudalism all that can be exploited uncritically.The folk works of the feudal era still bear the influence of the feudal ruling class to some extent.

We should be good at analysis, and we should use the culture of feudalism critically, but not uncritically.An anti-feudal culture is of course better than a feudal one, but it must be used critically and in a differentiated way.As far as I know, this is our current policy.As for making full use of cultural heritage, we haven't done it yet.There are a lot of Chinese classical works, and now they are sorting them out by categories, gradually sorting them out with modern scientific viewpoints, and republishing them. You mentioned that Chinese painters are copying Western painting methods, and this situation exists.This kind of plagiarism has been going on for decades, nearly a hundred years, especially when copying European things. They look down on their own country's cultural heritage and try their best to copy the West.We've been criticizing this situation for some time, and it's a bad ethos.Not only painting, but also music, there are such a group of people who plagiarize from the West, and they look down on things from their own nation.The same goes for literature, but in a slightly better way.In this regard, we have conducted criticism, and after the criticism, the novel was better, but the problem of poetry has not been resolved.

In terms of culture, people of all countries should make contributions to mankind according to their national characteristics.The cultures of different countries have similarities but also differences.What they have in common is that they are all in the same era, in the second half of the twentieth century, so there is always something in common.But if everyone draws the same picture and sings the same tune, the sameness will be bad, and no one will see it, listen to it, or appreciate it. Published based on the transcript of the conversation kept by the Central Archives. -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------

note [1] This is part of Mao Zedong's conversation with the Cuban women's delegation and the Ecuadorian cultural delegation.