BANNEDTHOUGHT.NET

The Great Debate Between Revolutionary China and the
Revisionist, then State-Capitalist, Soviet Union

Publications and Documents which are Now Difficult to Find


      In this section of BannedThought.net we are collecting together many of the publications and documents from the Mao era in China which focus on what has been called “The Great Debate” between revolutionary China and the revisionist (and then state-capitalist and social-imperialist) Soviet Union. Bourgeois ideologists in the West generally call this the Sino-Soviet Split—prone, as they are, to trying to remove the class-struggle essence from the debate, and falsely re-framing it along purely national lines.

      While Maoist China did its best to get its views in this Great Debate spread to all the world, the U.S. and many other countries tried to prevent this spread of revolutionary ideology. For this reason, many of the pamphlets and materials below were not all that easy to find even during the period of this Great Debate. And over time they have become ever more difficult to locate. Quite a few are available on the Internet, but spread across a large number of different sites. And a number of the documents below do not seem to be available at this time anywhere else on the Internet.

      Even the materials from the Soviet revisionist side of this Great Debate are now becoming fairly difficult to locate, though echos of them continue reverberating in pseudo-revolutionary and social-democratic circles on the “Left”. For these reasons we intend to post many of them for reference on this web site as well. Note that the Chinese side, when issuing pamphlets directly responding to Letters from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), invariably included the CPSU letters as well. Many additional articles, pamphlets and books published in the Soviet Union, which attack Maoism and China, are now being posted for reference in the “Revisionist Soviet Criticism of Revolutionary China” sub-section of “The State Capitalist/Social-Imperialist Era of the USSR” section on the Soviet Union page on BannedThought.net.

      It should be noted that some of the documents in this section, and in the other sub-sections of BannedThought.net on the Mao Era, were written by (or positively refer to) Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Lin Biao, or other individuals who themselves became targets of the revolution at various points. We are including such materials here—despite their errors (or crimes!)—as part of our documentary record of the Chinese revolution and its internal and international class struggles.

      In addition to the documents from China itself in the Maoist period we have sections below with comments about that era, both contemporary comments and retrospective commentaries written much later.

      If you know of other materials which should be posted here, or if you have other comments or suggestions, please contact us at: freespeech@bannedthought.net



Magazines from China, Mostly from the Maoist Era (which include much material about the Great Debate)

Contemporary Foreign Commentary about China During the Maoist Era
(Containing at least some materials related to the Great Debate)

Retrospective Commentary about the Great Debate (in whole or in part)



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