Chapter 12 Don't be superstitious that everything is good in a socialist country[1]

(June 28, 1956) You can talk to the heads of our government ministries, military, party and mass organizations.You can talk to whoever you want to talk to.If the people you talk to only talk about achievements and not about mistakes and shortcomings, then they are not reflecting the true situation of reality.People with more experience will not believe this.Let us not be superstitious and think that everything is fine in a socialist country.Everything has two sides: a good side and a bad side.In our society, there must be good things and bad things, good people and bad people, advanced and backward.It is precisely because of this that we have to transform and transform bad things into good things.We must be prepared to have bad things, otherwise when a problem comes out, we will think it is a big deal.In the past it was believed that the Soviet Union was innocent, but now that the Stalin issue has emerged, many people are overwhelmed with surprise.The world is beautiful, but it is not beautiful. There are struggles and contradictions in the world.Hope everything is ok, this is our subjective, and reality is objective.There are good things and bad things in the world. It has been like this since ancient times, and it will be like this ten thousand years from now.It is precisely because there are bad things in the world that we have to reform and do work.But we won't get everything right, or our descendants will have no jobs to do.

Nothing can be overdone, and if it is overdone, you will make mistakes.Stalin was basically right and made great achievements, but he made big mistakes and did many wrong things.Stalin just went too far.Suppressing counter-revolutionaries is a good thing, but if it goes too far, it is a big mistake to regard revolutionary comrades as counter-revolutionaries.When I told Soviet comrades that they had made mistakes in the past and would continue to make mistakes in the future, they did not quite believe it.We also made many mistakes, big mistakes.In our Party, there were Chen Duxiu’s Right opportunism[2], Li Lisan’s “Left” opportunism[3], Wang Ming’s “Left” opportunism[4], Zhang Guotao’s Right opportunism[5], Wang Ming’s [6] and Gao Gang’s right-leaning anti-Party opportunism[7], there will definitely be mistakes in the future, and there will be people like Gao Gang and others.We want to make the error smaller, it is possible.But it is unrealistic to deny that we will make mistakes, then it is not the world, not the earth, but Mars.

According to the "Mao Zedong Diplomatic Selected Works" published in 1994 by Central Literature Publishing House and World Knowledge Publishing House. -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ note [1] This is the main part of the conversation between Mao Zedong and the Romanian ambassador to China, Nicola Choloiu. [2] For Chen Duxiu’s right-leaning opportunism, see note [3] on page 56 of this volume. [3] For Li Lisan's "left" opportunism, see note [10] on page 58 of this volume. [4] For Wang Ming’s “Left” opportunism, see note [18] on page 47 of this volume.

[5] For Zhang Guotao’s right-leaning opportunism, see note [12] on page 58 of this volume. [6] For Wang Ming’s right-leaning opportunism, see note [19] on page 48 of this volume. [7] Gao Gang’s right-leaning anti-Party opportunism, see note [7] on page 45 of this volume.