Why You Should Start Reading Mao's Selected Works Right Now

These past few days I've been watching the anime adaptation of Tales of Herding Gods.

It's well made, with an appealing setting, a tight plot, and full characters. You can tell it's a textbook xianxia fantasy.

I was watching it as just another anime. I never expected one scene to fill the screen with bullet comments saying "Long live the people!"

Why would comments like that show up? In the story, the hero Qin Mu's blind master teaches him to see through the demons in his heart with his eyes. He takes Qin Mu to the statue of a god, and Qin Mu, crushed by the god's presence, doesn't dare look up.

The blind master says:

"Breaking the god in the temple is easy. Breaking the god in your heart is hard."

"What weighs on your heart is a false god, a fake god, and it must be broken! Anything that makes you kneel as a slave, even a true god, you must never kneel to!"

"Better to stand and be your own god than to kneel and beg a god for mercy. In this world, nobody is nobler than anybody else. To hell with the gods."

The screen full of "Long live the people!" moved me. I couldn't help wondering why this kind of scene made viewers think of the great man.

"The wheat has ripened thousands of times, but 'Long live the people' came only once."

That line, which has spread widely online, came to mind. Its spirit is exactly the same as the blind master's words.

In Tales of Herding Gods, most ordinary people live under the gods' protection, pressure, and oracles. The gods' every move decides everyone's fate.

The truly top-tier powers in the story all share one trait: they see through.

They saw through the gods, saw through the impossible, and became powers in their own right.

Now turn history back a hundred years from today. With his whole life, Mao Zedong played out a drama that these days you'd only find in a xianxia novel, and he recorded it in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong as proof.

Speaking of seeing through, how many things did Mao see through in his life?

He saw through China's class structure and wrote "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society."

He saw through the peasant movement and wrote "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan."

He saw through revolution and wrote "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire."

He saw through imperialism and wrote "Imperialism and All Reactionaries Are Paper Tigers."

He saw through war and wrote "On Protracted War."

He saw through dogma and wrote "Oppose Book Worship."

He saw through human knowledge and wrote "On Practice."

He saw through the universe and wrote "On Contradiction."

Seeing through things sounds simple, but it's actually hard to do.

The hard part is that you first have to admit you didn't understand before.

The hard part is taking everything you always assumed was right, everything you were used to, everything everyone says, and weighing it all again.

The hard part is that after you see through something, you still have to dare to say it and dare to write it down.

Mao did this his whole life. Each thing he saw through, he set down.

Some of what he wrote was useful right away. Some is still useful a hundred years later.

His greatness isn't only that he saw through everything. After accomplishing it all, he didn't stop and become one of those hermit masters from xianxia novels.

He founded his own school, with contradiction as its creed and practice as its method.

He turned "seeing through" into a "method," turned the "method" into a "road," walked the road all the way through, and then turned back to lead everyone onto it.

That road is called "materialist dialectics." It's called "Mao Zedong Thought."

So today, on World Book Day, I have to recommend the Selected Works of Mao Zedong to you. I hope you'll step onto this road of "seeing through" too.

People online always say, "Long live the ever-victorious Mao Zedong Thought." But I think when we spread Mao Zedong Thought, we shouldn't make it into a god. We should make it a road.

A god sits high above. A road is solid under your feet.

And everyone walking that road is their own one-of-a-kind god.

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So for me, "materialist dialectics" is "Mao Zedong Thought," the absolute core of the Selected Works.

But starting from the term "materialist dialectics" alone feels too abstract.

So I started a writing column called Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works. It's now in Season 1, which takes apart Volume I of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong and draws out the parts about "materialist dialectics" for in-depth writing.

If you're one of the following kinds of people, I highly recommend buying my column. Right now it's at the early-bird price: just ¥9.9 unlocks the whole season of at least 20 articles.

Click the cover below to go to the column: