PREFACE AND POSTSCRIPT TO RURAL SURVEYS
March and April 1941
March 17, 1941
The present rural policy of the Party is not one of Agrarian
Revolution as during the ten years' civil war, but is a rural policy for the
National United Front Against Japan. The whole Party should carry out the
Central Committee's directives of July 7 and December 25, 1940, [1] and the directives
of the forthcoming Seventh National Congress. The following material is being
published to help comrades find a method for studying problems. Many of our
comrades still have a crude and careless style of work, do not seek to
understand things thoroughly and may even be completely ignorant of conditions
at the lower levels, and yet they are responsible for directing work. This is
an extremely dangerous state of affairs. Without a really concrete knowledge of
the actual conditions of the classes in Chinese society there can be no really
good leadership.
The only way to know conditions is to make social investigations,
to investigate the conditions of each social class in real life. For those
charged with directing work, the basic method for knowing conditions is to
concentrate on a few cities and villages according to a plan, use the
fundamental viewpoint of Marxism, i.e., the method of class analysis, and make
a number of thorough investigations. Only thus can we acquire even the most
rudimentary knowledge of China's social problems.
To do this, first, direct your eyes downward, do not hold your
head high and gaze at the sky. Unless a person is interested in turning his
eyes downward and is determined to do so, he will never in his whole life
really understand things in China.
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