“Fight Selfishness and Criticize Revisionism”

“Fight Selfishness and Criticize Revisionism” is a revolutionary slogan in the Maoist vocabulary of the novel, but its changing uses make it more than a fixed political formula. Recited as part of collective ideological practice, exchanged playfully by Wu Dawang and Liu Lian, and later altered on a washbowl during their destruction of revolutionary memorabilia, it traces the movement from public discipline to private appropriation and open repudiation.

Official Formula and Collective Practice

The slogan belongs to a political language that surrounds Wu Dawang’s military life. His reputation rests partly on his ability to recite Mao Zedong’s words: at a Mass Theory and Practice of Frontline Logistics Competition, he delivers 286 quotations and three essays from memory, including “Serve the People.” His performance earns him further recognition as a Model Soldier and helps secure his appointment as the Division Commander’s full-time orderly and cook. In this setting, mastery of revolutionary language is not incidental: it is part of the public measure of his usefulness and merit.

The slogan also appears amid the barracks’ organized ideological activities. On a hot summer evening, soldiers across the drill ground, roads, and company yards take part in postprandial drills and educational exercises framed as opposition to imperialism and the capitalist road and as the reconstruction of the socialist superstructure. The political vocabulary gives the collective scene its official purpose, making ideological discipline visible as a repeated group practice.

The Political Instructor later turns that same framework into an argument about Wu’s duty toward Liu Lian. He invokes the hardships of revolution, international threats, and the possible consequences of failing to look after the Division Commander’s wife, linking domestic service to the readiness of the division and, in an escalating chain, to the army’s future. The speech reveals how political abstractions can be made to justify the personal demands of military hierarchy: care for a senior officer’s household is presented as service to the people.

From Recitation to Intimate Exchange

During a shared kitchen scene, Wu and Liu find the “Serve the People!” sign on the table and turn familiar political formulas into an affectionate repartee. Wu offers “Serve the People” as a reason for Liu to sit and rest; she answers with “Fight Selfishness and Criticize Revisionism,” also telling him to rest. He counters with another revolutionary formula about coming together for a common goal, proposing that they cook together. Liu concludes with a line about the people as the driving force of history and turns the cooking into a competition.

The exchange does not erase the slogan’s official meaning; it changes the social work it performs. Instead of instructing soldiers or defining public virtue, the phrase becomes part of a private, mutual game in which each partner borrows and redirects the other’s language. The repeated cadence of ideological call and response remains recognizable, but the stakes have shifted from political instruction to shared domestic activity. The scene makes the slogan’s pliability legible: the same words can sound dutiful in public and intimate in private.

Alteration and Rejection

Later, while the couple systematically searches out and damages objects associated with Mao Zedong and revolutionary leaders, Wu encounters a washbowl bearing the slogan. He writes “Please Yourself” over it. Liu, meanwhile, smears the words and portraits on two enamel army mugs before throwing them into a ceramic basin; the pair go on to deface or destroy the household’s revolutionary pictures, vessels, furniture, and other memorabilia. The slogan’s alteration is one specific act within a broader removal of the political imagery that has filled their surroundings.

The replacement phrase does not merely conceal the original wording: it reverses its moral direction. A command to oppose self-interest becomes an invitation to please oneself. That reversal connects the scene to the couple’s earlier playful reuse of slogans, but changes its tone and force. What had been a shared joke now forms part of a deliberate repudiation of the symbols and formulas governing the household. The altered washbowl makes the conflict concrete: revolutionary language is no longer simply recited or borrowed; it is overwritten.

Narrative Significance

Across these scenes, the slogan moves through three distinct settings: the public culture of soldierly performance, the couple’s intimate verbal play, and the destruction of political objects. Its recurrence binds together Wu’s rewarded fluency in revolutionary speech, the domestic obligations justified in political terms, and the couple’s later rejection of the household’s revolutionary imagery.

The changing phrase also sharpens the novel’s irony. A formula about resisting selfishness is first part of an institutional language that rewards exemplary service, then a playful token of cooperation, and finally the surface Wu deliberately changes to express the opposite principle. Rather than treating political language as powerless, the sequence shows how its repeated forms can be used to organize conduct, create private intimacy, or expose the distance between an official ideal and the interests and choices of the people expected to embody it.