Some foreigners say that our ideological reform is brainwashing. As I see it, they are correct in what they say. It is washing brains, that’s what it is! This brain of mine was washed to become what it is. After joining the revolution, it was slowly washed, washed for several decades. What I received before was all bourgeois education, and even some feudal education. I read many books by Confucius. We didn’t know at the time the names of Marx or Engels, only Washington and Napoleon.

—Mao Zedong in a speech to Chinese students at Moscow State University in 1957