On the Cultivation of Communist Party Members and the Party-Nature Transformation of the Self-Cultivation Tradition

The entry of the term xiuyang (self-cultivation / moral cultivation) into the discourse of Party building is inseparable from a text that cannot be circumvented—Liu Shaoqi’s 1939 work Lun Gongchandangyuan de Xiuyang (On the Cultivation of Communist Party Members). Originally delivered as a lecture at the Yan’an Marxist-Leninist Institute and subsequently revised into written form, this work was first serialized in the journal Liberation (Jiefang), then immediately printed as a separate monograph and distributed to various base areas. It subsequently underwent two revisions and republications in 1949 and 1962, and in 1981 was included in the Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi. Across these various editions, the term “xiuyang” gradually evolved from a vocabulary item carrying distinct Confucian hues into a core concept of Party spirit education. Tracing this publishing trajectory reveals that the entry of traditional self-cultivation thought into intra-Party discourse did not rely upon the simple transposition or direct transplantation of terminology. Rather, with regard to the fundamental questions of for whom cultivation is undertaken, upon what basis it is undertaken, and by what methods it is undertaken, the text made comprehensive new arrangements according to the educational objectives of the Party and the concrete requirements of revolutionary practice. The contemporary emphasis on “yan yi xiuxing” (being strict in self-cultivation / strict self-cultivation) as the foremost priority among the “Three Stricts and Three Earnests,” and the characterization of Party spirit education as the “xinxue” (learning of the mind / heart-mind learning) of Communists, represents the subsequent unfolding and continuation of this transformation. In this sense, the publishing history of this seminal work itself constitutes a concrete, material pathway through which traditional self-cultivation culture reaches Party spirit cultivation in the new era.