Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
March 1958
[SOURCE: Long Live Mao Zedong Thought, a Red Guard Publication.]
The Mongols and Han should co-operate closely and have faith in Marxism. All our minority nations should trust each other, no matter what nationalities they are. They must see on which side truth lies. Marx himself was a Jew, Stalin belonged to a minority nation; and Chiang Kai-shek is a Han, a bad one, whom we strongly oppose. We must not insist that only people of a given province take charge of the administration of that province. The place of origin of a man is irrelevant — northerner or southerner, this national minority or that minority, [they are all the same]. The questions are whether they have communism and how much. This point should be explained clearly to our national minorities.
To begin with, the Han was not a big race, but a mixture of a great number of races. The Han people have conquered many minority nations in history and driven them to the highlands. [We] must take a historical view of our nationality question and find out that we either depend on minority nationalism or on communism. Of course we depend on communism. We need our regions but not regionalism.