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The 1978 Truth Criterion Controversy (Chinese: 真理标准大讨论; lit. 'Debate on Standards for Judging the Truth'), also known as the 1978 Truth Criterion Discussion, sometimes referred to as the First Great Debate (Chinese: 第一次大争论) in contemporary China, was a sociopolitical debate around 1978, mainly revolving around Hua Guofeng's "Two Whatevers" and Deng Xiaoping's "Reform ...
Mao also discussed frugality and productivity in the economic development of China, writing, "It is a great contradiction for all cadres and all people to always think of our country as a big socialist country, but also a poor country with economic backwardness. To make our country prosperous and strong, it will take decades of frugal ...
Practice is not only the criterion for testing truth, but the only criterion. Chairman Mao said: "There is only one truth, and whoever discovers the truth does not rely on subjective exaggeration, but on objective practice." Only the revolutionary practice of millions of people is the yardstick for testing the truth.
Mao enthusiastically agreed with this decision, arguing for an alliance across China's socio-economic classes, and eventually rose to become propaganda chief of the KMT. [60] Mao was a vocal anti-imperialist and in his writings he lambasted the governments of Japan, the UK and US, describing the latter as "the most murderous of hangmen". [71]
On Contradiction, along with Mao's text On Practice, elevated Mao's reputation as a Marxist theoretician. [ 12 ] : 37 It became a foundational text of Mao Zedong Thought . [ 4 ] : 9 After Mao was celebrated in the Eastern Bloc following China's intervention in the Korean War , both texts became widely read in the USSR.
On Practice expands on Mao's criticism of dogmatism in his 1930 essay, Oppose Book Worship. [3]: 96–97 The text begins with Mao's emphasis on practice over theory, and states, "Marxists hold that man's social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world."
According to Hua-yu Li, writing in Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China, 1948–1953 in 1953, Mao, misled by glowing reports in History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik): Short Course, authorized by Stalin of social and economic progress in the Soviet Union, abandoned the liberal economic programs of "New Democracy ...
To Mao, the victory of 1949 was a confirmation of theory and practice. "Optimism is the keynote to Mao's intellectual orientation in the post-1949 period." [9]: 118 Mao assertively revised the theory to relate it to the new practice of socialist construction. These revisions are apparent in the 1951 version of On Contradiction. "In the 1930s ...