The question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled.

The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the different political forces, and the class struggle in the ideological field between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue to be long and tortuous and at times will even become very acute.

Thus, for the first time in the theory and practice of the international communist movement, it was pointed out explicitly that classes and class struggle still exist after the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production has been in the main completed, and that the proletariat must continue the revolution.

The proletarian headquarters headed by Chairman Mao led the broad masses in carrying on the great struggle in the direction he indicated. From the struggle against the bourgeois rightists in 1957 to the struggle to uncover Peng Teh-huai's anti-Party clique at the Lushan Meeting in 1959, from the great debate on the general line of the Party in building socialism to the struggle between the two lines in the socialist education movement-the focus of the struggle was the question of whether to take the socialist road or to take the capitalist road, whether to uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat or to restore the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Every single victory of Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line, every victory in every major campaign launched by the Party against the bourgeoisie, was gained only after smashing the revisionist line represented by Liu Shao-chi, which either was Right or was "Left" in form but Right in essence.

Now it has been proved through investigation that as far back as the First Revolutionary Civil War period Liu Shao-chi betrayed the Party, capitulated to the enemy and became a hidden traitor and scab, that he was a crime-steeped lackey of the imperialists, modern revisionists and Kuomintang reactionaries and that he was the arch-representative of the persons in power taking the capitalist road. He had a political line by which he vainly attempted to restore capitalism in China and turn her into an imperialist and revisionist colony. In addition, he had an organizational line to serve his counterrevolutionary political line. For many years, recruiting deserters and turncoats, Liu Shao-chi gathered together a gang of renegades, enemy agents, and capitalist-roaders in power. They covered up their counter-revolutionary political records, shielded each other, colluded in doing evil, usurped important Party and government posts and controlled the leadership in many central and local units, thus forming an underground bourgeois headquarters in opposition to the proletarian headquarters headed by Chairman Mao. They collaborated with the imperialists, modern revisionists and Kuomintang reactionaries and played the kind of disruptive role that the U.S. imperialists, the Soviet revisionists and the reactionaries of various countries were not in a position to do.

In 1939, when the War of Resistance Against Japan and for National Liberation led by Chairman Mao was vigorously surging forward, Liu Shao-chi dished up his sinister book Self-Cultivation. The core of that book was the betrayal of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It did not touch at all upon the questions of defeating Japanese imperialism and of waging the struggle against the Kuomintang reactionaries, nor did it touch upon the fundamental Marxist-Leninist principle of seizing state power by armed force; on the contrary, it urged Communist Party members to depart from the great practice of revolution and indulge in idealistic "self-cultivation", which actually meant that Communists should "cultivate" themselves into willing slaves going down on their knees before the counter-revolutionary dictatorship of the imperialists and the Kuomintang reactionaries.

After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan, when the U.S. imperialists were arming Chiang Kai-shek's counter-revolutionary troops in preparation for launching an all-out offensive against the liberated areas, Liu Shao-chi, catering to the needs of the U.S.-Chiang reactionaries, dished up the capitulationist line, alleging that "China has entered the new stage of peace and democracy". It was designed to oppose Chairman Mao's general line of "go all out to mobilize the masses, expand the people's forces and, under the leadership of our Party, defeat the aggressor and build a new China", and to oppose Chairman Mao's policy of "give tit for tat and fight for every inch of land", which was adopted to counter the offensive of the U.S.-Chiang reactionaries. Liu Shao-chi preached that "at present the main forn of the struggle of the Chinese revolution has changed from armed struggle to non-armed and mass parliamentary struggle". He tried to abolisl - the Party's leadership over the people's armed forces and to "unify" the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army, predecessors of the People's Liberation Army, into Chiang Kai-shek's "national army" and to demobilize large numbers of worker and peasant soldiers led by the Party in a vain attempt to eradicate the people's armed forces, strangle the Chinese revolution and hand over to the Kuomintang the fruits of victory which the Chinese people had won in blood.

In April 1949, on the eve of the country-wide victory of China's new-democratic revolution when the Chinese People's Liberation Army was preparing to cross the Yangtse River, Liu Shao-chi hurried to Tientsin and threw himself into the arms of the capitalists. He wildly opposed the policy of utilizing, restricting and transforming private capitalist industry, a policy decided upon by the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Party which had just concluded. He clamoured that "capitalism in China today is still in its youth", that it needed an unlimited "big expansion" and that "capitalist exploitation today is no crime, it is a merit". He shamelessly praised the capitalist class, saying that "the more they exploit, the greater their merit", and feverishly advertised the revisionist theory of productive forces. He did all this in his futile attempt to lead China onto the capitalist road.

In short, at the many important historical junctures of the new-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution, Liu Shao-chi and his gang always wantonly opposed Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line and engaged in counterrevolutionary conspiratorial and disruptive activities. However, since they were counter-revolutionaries, their plots were bound to come to light. When Khrushchov came to power, and especially when the Soviet revisionists ganged up with the U.S. imperialists and the reactionaries of India and other countries in whipping up a large-scale anti-China campaign, Liu Shao-chi and his gang became all the more rabid.

Chairman Mao was the first to perceive the danger of the counter-revolutionary plots of Liu Shao-chi and his gang. At the working conference of the Central Committee in January 1962, Chairman Mao pointed out the necessity of guarding against the emergence of revisionism. At the working conference of the Central Committee at Peitaiho in August 1962 and at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Party in September of the same year, Chairman Mao put forward more comprehensively the basic line of our Party for the whole historical period of socialism. Chairman Mao pointed out:

Socialist society covers a fairly long historical period. In the historical period of socialism, there are still classes, class contraictions and class struggle, there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, and there is the danger of capitalist restoration. We must recognize the protracted and complex nature of this struggle. We must heighten our vigilance. We must conduct socialist education. We must correctly understand and handle class contradictions and class struggle, distinguish the contradictions between ourselves and the enemy from those among the people and handle them correctly. Otherwise a socialist country like ours will turn into its opposite and degenerate, and a capitalist restoration will take place. From now on we must remind ourselves of this every year, every month and every day so that we can retain a rather sober understanding of this problem and have a Marxist-Leninist line.

This Marxist-Leninist line advanced by Chairman Mao is the lifeline of our Party.

Following this, in May 1963, under the direction of Chairman Mao, the Draft Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on Certain Problems in Our Present Rural Work (i.e., the 10-Point Decision) was worked out, which laid down the line, principles and policies of the Party for the socialist education movement. Chairman Mao again warned the whole Party: If classes and class struggle were forgotten and if the dictatorship of the proletariat were forgotten,

then it would not be long, perhaps only several years or a decade, or several decades at most, before a counter-revolutionary restoration on a national scale would inevitably occur, the Marxist-Leninist party would undoubtedly become a revisionist party or a fascist party, and the whole of China would change its colour. Comrades, please think it over. What a dangerous situation this would be!

Thus Chairman Mao still more sharply showed the whole Party and the whole nation the danger of the restoration of capitalism.

All these warnings and struggles did not and could not in the least change the reactionary class nature of Liu Shao-chi and his gang. In 1964, in the great socialist education movement, Liu Shao-chi came out to repress the masses, shield the capitalist-roaders in power and openly attack the Marxist scientific method of investigating and studying social conditions initiated by Chairman Mao, branding it as "outdated". He raved that whoever refused to carry out his line was "not qualified to hold a leading post". He and his gang were working against time to restore capitalism. At the end of 1964. Chairman Mao convened a working conference of the Central Committee and, under his diirection, the document Some Current Problems Raised in the Socialist Education Movement in the Rural Areas (i.e., the 23-Point Document) was drawn up. He denounced Liu Shao-chi's bourgeois reactionary line which was "Left" in form but Right in essence and repudiated Liu Shao-chi's absurdities, such as "the intertwining of the contradictions inside and outside the Party" and "the contradiction between the 'four cleans' and the 'four uncleans' ". And for the first time Chairman Mao specifically indicated: "The main target of the present movement is those Party persons in power taking the capitalist road." This new conclusion drawn by Chairman Mao after summing up the historical experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat, domestic and international, set right the course of the socialist education movement and clearly showed the orientation for the approaching Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Reviewing the history of this period, we can see that the current Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with the participation of hundreds of millions of revolutionary people has by no means occurred accidentally. It is the inevitable result of the protracted and sharp struggle between the two classes, the two roads and the two lines in socialist society. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is

a great political revolution carried out by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes; it is a continuation of the prolonged struggle waged by the Chinese Communist Party and the masses of revolutionary people under its leadership against the Kuomintang reactionaries, a continuation of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bour-geoisie.

The heroic Chinese proletariat, poor and lower-middle peasants, People's Liberation Army, revolutionary cadres and revolutionary intellectuals, who were all determined to follow the great leader Chairman Mao closely in taking the socialist road, could no longer tolerate the restoration activities of Liu Shao-chi and his gang, and so a great class battle was unavoidable.

As Chairman Mao pointed out in his talk in February 1967:

In the past we waged struggles in rural areas, in factories, in the cultural field, and we carried out the socialist education movement. But all this failed to solve the problem because we did not find a form, a method, to arouse the broad masses to expose our dark aspect openly, in an all-round way and from below.

Now we have found this form - it is the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It is only by arousing the masses in their hundreds of millions to air their views freely, write big-character posters and hold great debates that the renegades, enemy agents, and capitalist-roaders in power who have wormed their way into the Party can be exposed and their plots to restore capitalism smashed. It is precisely with the participation of the broad masses in the examination of Liu Shao-chi's case that his true features as an old-line counter-revolutionary, renegade, hidden traitor and scab were brought to light. The Enlarged Twelfth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Party decided to dismiss Liu Shao-chi from all posts both inside and outside the Party and to expel him from the Party once and for all. This was a great victory for the hundreds of millions of the people. On the basis of the theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, our great teacher Chairman Mao has personally initiated and led the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This is indeed "absolutely necessary and most timely" and it is a new and great contribution to the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism.