Introduction

The peak of Ideology has been reached. From here you can look down (in more ways than one) on the Leadership base camp and the Management foothills. From where you’re standing, they look relatively small and insignificant, compared to the magnificent vistas and all round vision that Ideology affords you. But you still have much to learn. Your journey is, in fact, never ending. The Ideology library is an asymptote: an ideal that you are constantly reaching for but can never fully obtain. This protects against complacency and revisionism. You must always be on your guard against old ideas that will re-emerge if the ideological struggle is not maintained at all times. This makes the Ideology library dynamic and never able to rest on its laurels. We have one more guide to learn from whose ideas were forged through the experience of leading and maintaining a revolution that has turned China into one of the most powerful countries in the world: Chairman Mao. And he did it through the power of ideology. Before the Chinese Revolution in 1949 China was a divided, feudal country with no national library system. The Revolution transformed Management libraries into Leadership libraries and then Ideology libraries under Mao's leadership. Mao stressed the importance of both leadership and ideology in the revolutionary process, which included the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. As Mao (1940, 382) said: ‘Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the revolution comes and is an important, indeed essential, fighting front in the general revolutionary front during the revolution’.