Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

the dictatorship of the proletariat, and tactfully but unequivocallycriticized the erroneous propositions of the 20th Congress.Is this not a widely known fact?Since the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the Chinese CommunistParty has continued to display the portrait of Stalinalong with those of the other great revolutionary leaders,Marx, Engels and Lenin. Is not this, too, a widely knownfact?It needs to be said, of course, that for the sake of unityagainst the enemy and out of consideration for the difficultposition the leaders of the CPSU were in, we refrained inthose days from open criticism of the errors of the 20th Congress,because the imperialists and the reactionaries of allcountries were exploiting these errors and carrying on frenziedactivities against the Soviet Union, against communismand against the people, and also because the leaders of theCPSU had not yet departed so far from Marxism-Leninismas they did later. We fervently hoped at the time that theleaders of the CPSU would put their errors right. Consequently,we always endeavoured to seek out positive aspectsand on public occasions gave them whatever support was appropriateand necessary.Even so, by stressing positive lessons and principles intheir public speeches, leading comrades of the Central Committeeof the CPC explained our position with regard to the20th Congress of the CPSU.The Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSUasserts that in his political report to the Eighth Congress ofthe CPC, Comrade Liu Shao-chi completely affirmed the 20thCongress of the CPSU. But it was in this very report thatComrade Liu Shao-chi spoke on the lessons of the Chineserevolution and explained that the road of “peaceful transition”was wrong and impracticable.The Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSUasserts that in his report to the Eighth Congress of the CPCon the revision of the Party Constitution, Comrade Teng66