Report to the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party to China

Delivered on April I and adopted on April 14, 1969

By LIN PIAO

Comrades!

The Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China will be a congress with a far-reaching influence in the history of our Party.

Our present congress is convened at a time when great victory has been won in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution personally initiated and led by Chairman Mao. This great revolutionary storm has shattered the bourgeois headquarters headed by the renegade, hidden traitor and scab Liu Shao-chi, exposed the handful of renegades, enemy agents and absolutely unrepentant persons in power taking the capitalist road within the Party, with Liu Shao-chi as their arch-representative, and smashed their plot to restore capitalism; it has tremendously strengthened the dictatorship of the proletariat of our country, tremendously strengthened our Party and thus prepared ample conditions for this congress politically, ideologically and organizationally.

I. On the Preparation for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of our country is a genuine proletarian revolution on an immense scale.

Chairman Mao has explained the necessity of the current great revolution in concise terms:

The current Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is absolutely necessary and most timely for consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat, preventing capitalist restoration and building socialism.

In order to comprehend this scientific thesis of Chairman Mao's fully, we should have a deep understanding of his theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In 1957, shortly after the conclusion of the Party's Eighth National Congress, Chairman Mao published his great work On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, in which, following his Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, he comprehensively set forth the existence of contradictions, classes and class struggle under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, set forth the thesis of the existence of two different types of contradictions in socialist society, those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people, and set forth the great theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Like a radiant beacon, this great work illuminates the course of China's socialist revolution and socialist construction and has laid the theoretical foundation for the current Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

In order to have a deeper understanding of Chairman Mao's great historic contribution, it is necessary briefly to review the historical experience of the international communist movement.

In 1852, Marx said:

Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that theexistence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production,2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Chinese ed., p. 63.)

Marx's theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat clearly distinguished scientific socialism from utopian socialism and sham socialism of every kind. Marx and Engels fought all their lives for this theory and for its realization.

After the death of Marx and Engels, almost all the parties of the Second International betrayed Marxism, with the exception of the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin. Lenin inherited, defended and developed Marxism in the struggle against the revisionism of the Second International. The struggle focused on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In denouncing the old revisionists, Lenin time and again stated:

Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists. . ... Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 25, p. 399.)

Lenin led the proletariat of Russia in winning the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution and founding the first socialist state. Through his great revolutionary practice in leading the dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin perceived the danger of the restoration of capitalism and the protracted nature of class struggle:

The transition from capitalism to Communism represents an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch has terminated, the exploiters inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope is converted into attempts at restoration. (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 28, p. 235.)

Lenin stated:

. . .the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by its overthrow (even if only in one country), and whose power lies not only in the strength of international capital, in the strength and durability of the international connections of the bourgeoisie, but also in theforce of habit,in the strength ofsmall production. For, unfortunately, small production is still very, very widespread in the world, and small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 31, p. 6.)

His conclusion was: "For all these reasons the dictatorship of the proletariat is essential". (Ibid.)

Lenin also stated that "the new bourgeoisie" was "arising from among our Soviet government employees". (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed, Vol. 29, p. 162.)

He pointed out that the danger of restoration also came from capitalist encirclement: The imperialist countries "will never miss an opportunity for military intervention, as they put it, i.e., to strangle Soviet power." (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 31, p. 423.)

The Soviet revisionist renegade clique has completely betrayed these brilliant teachings of Lenin's. From Khrushchov to Brezhnev and company, they are all persons in power taking the capitalist road, who have long concealed themselves in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As soon as they came to power, they turned the bourgeoisie's "hope of restoration" into "attemptsat restoration", usurped the leadership of the Party of Lenin and Stalin and, through "peaceful evolution", turned the world's first state of the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dark fascist state of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Chairman Mao has waged a tit-for-tat struggle against modern revisionism with the Soviet revisionist renegade clique as its centre and has inherited, defended and developed the Marxist-Leninist theory of proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Chairman Mao has comprehensively summed up the historical experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat both in the positive and negative aspects and, in order to prevent the restoration of capitalism, has put forward the theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

As early as March 1949, on the eve of the transition of the Chinese revolution from the new-democratic revolution to the socialist revolution, Chairman Mao explicitly pointed out in his report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Party: After the country-wide seizure of power by the proletariat, the principal internal contradiction is "the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie". The heart of the struggle is still the question of state power. Chairman Mao especially reminded us:

After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will still be enemies without guns; they are bound to struggle desperately against us, and we must never regard these enemies lightly. If we do not now raise and understand the problem in this way, we shall commit the gravest mistakes.

Having foreseen the protracted and complex nature of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Chairman Mao set the whole Party the militant task of fighting imperialism, the Kuomintang and the bourgeoisie in the political, ideological, economic, cultural and diplomatic spheres.

Our Party waged intense battles in accordance with the resolution of the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee and the Party's general line for the transition period formulated by Chairman Mao. In 1956, the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production in agriculture, handicrafts and capitalist industry and commerce was in the main completed. That was the crucial moment for the question of whether the socialist revolution could continue to advance. In view of the rampancy of revisionism in the international communist movement and the new trends of class struggle in our country, Chairman Mao, in his great work On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, called the attention of the whole Party to the following fact:

In China, although in the main socialist transformation has been completed with respect to the system of ownership . . . there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remoulding of the petty bourgeoisie has only just started.

Countering the fallacy put forward by Liu Shao-chi in 1956 that "in China, the question of which wins out, socialism or capitalism, is already solved", Chairman Mao specifically pointed out: