ANNEX F // THE OBJECT FILE // QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MAO TSE-TUNG // FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS, PEKING, 1966

THE RED BOOK

One billion official copies of a pocket-sized anthology assembled by an army newspaper. The most printed book of the twentieth century after the Bible, and the only artefact in this archive that was issued rather than published. This annex files it as an object — what it was made of, who made it, how many were pressed, what it was used for, and what happened when the man who wrote its foreword died in a plane crash.

OBJECT FILE 1964–1979 TEXT NOT HOSTED HERE

01 The Object

Not a book in the ordinary sense. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung was compiled in 1964 by the staff of PLA Daily, under the General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army, then directed by Lin Biao. It was designed to specification: small enough for a tunic pocket, bound in red vinyl so it would survive a field, printed in a type size a conscript with two years of schooling could read. It was issued to soldiers before it was ever sold to civilians.

That origin is the whole point of the file. Every other document in this archive was written to win an argument — FILE 02's manifesto, the Twenty-One Conditions, the Erfurt Programme. This one was written to be carried. It is the tradition's only mass-produced piece of equipment, and it should be read the way you read a field manual: by asking what task it was cut down to fit.

Mao Zedong and Lin Biao reviewing ranks of Red Guards in Beijing, November 1966
10 Nov 1966 // Mao and Lin Biao review the Red Guards — the two men on either side of the foreword, five years before one of them was erased from it
A book compiled by an army newspaper, issued as kit, and later held up in a crowd as proof of who you were.— THE ARCHIVE, ON WHAT KIND OF OBJECT THIS IS

02 Print History

May 1964 — first edition, 200-odd quotations in 30 chapters, issued internally within the PLA. Not a commercial publication and not, at first, intended as one.

1965 — the second edition expands to the 33 chapters indexed in §03 below, the arrangement that became canonical.

March 1966 — 28 million copies of the second edition have been printed. The book has left the army.

1966 — the Foreign Languages Press in Peking issues the official English translation, the edition most readers outside China have ever handled, and the one this annex indexes. Editions follow in dozens of languages, distributed as a deliberate instrument of foreign policy.

December 1966 — Lin Biao's foreword is added, instructing the reader to study Chairman Mao's writings, follow his teachings and act according to his instructions. The book now carries an explicit endorsement from Mao's designated successor.

13 September 1971 — Lin Biao dies in a plane crash over Mongolia, fleeing after an alleged coup attempt. His foreword is torn out of existing copies and removed from new printings. Millions of surviving copies from this period have a stub where a page was. Nothing in the archive illustrates the mechanics of a personality cult more economically than a page removed from a book by hand, at scale.

12 February 1979 — a Central Propaganda Department circular withdraws the book from circulation and halts printing. At least one billion official copies exist by this point; counting unofficial and foreign printings, credible estimates run several times higher.

03 The Contents

The 33 chapters of the second edition, in order, with the archive's note on each. The text itself is not hosted here. Each chapter links out to the full English translation in the Mao Internet Archive at marxists.org, which has carried it for decades. The reasoning is in §05.

CH 01 The Communist Party The book opens where the tradition does: the party as the instrument, not the class as a mood. CH 02 Classes and Class Struggle Test 2 of the register's instrument, stated as doctrine rather than as one axis among several. CH 03 Socialism and Communism The maximum program, kept explicit — the thing Annex C finds missing from most entries. CH 04 The Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People The 1957 speech compressed: antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and who is inside the people. CH 05 War and Peace War as politics continued, filed without euphemism. CH 06 Imperialism and All Reactionaries are Paper Tigers The formula that travelled furthest outside China. CH 07 Dare to Struggle and Dare to Win Voluntarism as doctrine — the chapter the school's critics point at first. CH 08 People's War The strategic core of FILE 12: the countryside surrounds the cities. CH 09 The People's Army An army that is political before it is military. CH 10 Leadership and Party Committees Committee method, collective leadership, the division of labour at the top. CH 11 The Mass Line From the masses, to the masses — the school's genuine methodological contribution. CH 12 Political Work The commissar's chapter. CH 13 Relations between Officers and Men Rank levelling inside the PLA. CH 14 Relations between the Army and the People The Three Rules and Eight Points, doctrinally stated. CH 15 Democracy and the Three Main Fields Democracy read as political, economic and military practice inside the army. CH 16 Education and the Training of Troops Training as political formation. CH 17 Serving the People The 1944 eulogy for Zhang Side, reduced to a slogan and then to a reflex. CH 18 Patriotism and Internationalism Test 4 of the instrument, and the chapter that repays the closest reading. CH 19 Revolutionary Heroism The martyr as pedagogy. CH 20 Building Our Country through Diligence and Frugality Accumulation without consumption, addressed to a peasant economy. CH 21 Self-reliance and Arduous Struggle The doctrine that outlived the Sino-Soviet split it was written into. CH 22 Methods of Thinking and Methods of Work Applied dialectics, in imperative mood. CH 23 Investigation and Study No investigation, no right to speak — the chapter most quoted against Maoists by Maoists. CH 24 Correcting Mistaken Ideas The 1929 Gutian resolution, distilled. CH 25 Unity Unity as a disciplinary requirement, not a sentiment. CH 26 Discipline Democratic centralism at the level of the individual cadre. CH 27 Criticism and Self-Criticism The mechanism the Cultural Revolution turned outward and could not turn off. CH 28 Communists What membership is supposed to cost. CH 29 Cadres The selection and formation of the apparatus. CH 30 Youth The chapter the Red Guards read as a commission. CH 31 Women Holding up half the sky — the tradition's strongest formal claim, and its least kept. CH 32 Culture and Art Yan'an 1942: art with a class position, and the licensing regime that followed. CH 33 Study The book closing by instructing you how to read the book.

04 What It Was Actually For

Between 1966 and 1971 the book stopped functioning as a text and started functioning as a credential. It was waved in formation at rallies, quoted at the opening of meetings, consulted before surgery and before ploughing, and — the part that matters for the schisms file — used as evidence in struggle sessions. Not owning one, or owning one insufficiently worn, was a fact about you that other people could act on.

This is the specific failure the archive wants on the record, because it is not unique to China and not confined to 1966. A body of theory compressed into portable slogans stops being something you can be wrong about and becomes something you can be caught not having. The school's own best contribution, the mass line of chapter 11 — that correct ideas come from the masses and must be returned to them — is precisely the method that a catechism makes impossible to practise. You cannot go to the masses to find out what is true if the answer is already printed in your pocket.

The quotation posters below are the clearest evidence of what the book had become. These are not illustrations of the text; they are single passages from it, blown up to wall size and printed as standalone objects. Chapter 17 and chapter 6 stopped being pages you turned to and became surfaces you walked past.

Chinese poster reproducing the Quotations from Chairman Mao passage Serving the People
Chapter 17 // "Serve the people", printed at wall scale
Chinese poster reproducing the Quotations from Chairman Mao passage on reactionaries as paper tigers
Chapter 6 // "All reactionaries are paper tigers" — the formula that travelled furthest
Reproduction of Mao Zedong's 1966 big-character poster titled Bombard the Headquarters
5 Aug 1966 // "Bombard the Headquarters" — Mao's own dazibao, written against his own party's leadership
Crowds reading big-character posters at Peking University in 1967
1967 // Peking University — the other paper medium of those years, and the uncontrollable one

The full case for and against the school is filed at FILE 12, where the Cultural Revolution is scored alongside the land reform, the literacy campaign and the famine. This annex covers the object, not the verdict.

05 Why the Text Is Not Hosted Here

Two reasons, and the archive states both rather than quietly linking out.

Copyright. Mao died in 1976, which puts the underlying Chinese text into the public domain in the People's Republic on 1 January 2027 under its life-plus-fifty term. The Foreign Languages Press English translation of 1966 is a separate copyrightable work, and in the United States a foreign work of that period was most likely restored to copyright by the 1994 URAA. Marxists.org has hosted this translation for decades and mirrors are everywhere; that is a fact about enforcement, not about the term. This archive links rather than copies.

Editorial. A complete hosted text would make this the longest document on the site by an order of magnitude, and it would be the only place in the archive where a single school's scripture is reproduced in full while every other school gets a dossier. Annex C applies one instrument to everyone; hosting one tendency's catechism and no other's would fail that standard on the archive's own terms.

06 Provenance

Chapter titles and ordering follow the second edition as carried by the Mao Internet Archive. Print figures and the 1979 withdrawal are drawn from Britannica and from the Cambridge global history of the book. The archive hosts no part of the text and claims no rights in it.

Plates are vendored from Wikimedia Commons and re-encoded to web size; the full credit and licence for each is printed in the Plate Room's provenance section. The Cultural Revolution photographs are in the public domain; the quotation posters are CC BY 2.0.