Deng Xiaoping in his own words:

Since the downfall of the Gang of Four an ideological trend has appeared that we call bourgeois liberalization. Its exponents worship the "democracy" and "freedom" of the Western capitalist countries and reject socialism. This cannot be allowed. China must modernize; it must absolutely not liberalize or take the capitalist road, as countries of the West have done. Those exponents of bourgeois liberalization who have violated state law must be dealt with severely.

Bourgeois liberalization would plunge our society into turmoil and make it impossible for us to proceed with the work of construction. To check bourgeois liberalization is therefore a matter of principle and one of vital importance for us.

By carrying out the open policy, learning foreign technologies and utilizing foreign capital, we mean to promote socialist construction, not to deviate from the socialist road. We intend to develop the productive forces, expand socialist public ownership and raise the people's income.

Without the Communist Party's leadership and without socialism, there is no future for China. This truth has been demonstrated in the past, and it will be demonstrated again in future. When we succeed in raising China's per capita GNP to US$4,000 and everyone is prosperous, that will better demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism, it will point the way for three quarters of the world's population, and it will provide further proof of the correctness of Marxism. Therefore, we must confidently keep to the socialist road and uphold the Four Cardinal Principles (the Four Cardinal Principles established by Deng that are not up for debate within the CPC: upholding the socialist path, upholding the people's democratic dictatorship, upholding the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and upholding Mao Zedong Thought and Marxism–Leninism).

This time, we have to take action against those who openly oppose socialism and the Communist Party.

The struggle against the bourgeois Rightists in 1957 was carried somewhat too far, and the mistakes made should be corrected. But that doesn't mean that we have negated the necessity for this struggle as a whole.

The struggle against bourgeois liberalization is indispensable. We should not be afraid that people abroad will say we are damaging our reputation. We must take our own road and build a socialism adapted to conditions in China -- that is the only way China can have a future. We must show foreigners that China's political situation is stable. If our country were plunged into disorder and our nation reduced to a heap of loose sand, how could we ever accomplish anything? The reason the imperialists were able to bully us in the past was precisely that we were a heap of loose sand.

Mao in 1944 in a message sent to Washington via John Service, a deputy to the US Ambassador to China:

China must industrialise. This can be done … only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital. Chinese and American interests are correlated and similar. They fit together, economically and politically … The United States would find us more cooperative than the Kuomintang.

Po Ku, the founder and director of Liberation Daily and a CPC Politburo member working directly under Mao's leadership, expounded to the deputy to the US Ambassador to China:

China at present is not even capitalistic. Its economy is still that of semifeudalism. We cannot advance at one jump to socialism. In fact, because we are at least two hundred years behind most of the rest of the world, we probably cannot hope to reach socialism until after most of the rest of the world has reached that state.

First we must rid ourselves of this semifeudalism. Then we must raise our economic level by a long stage of democracy and free enterprise.

What we Communists hope to do is to keep China moving smoothly and steadily toward this goal ...

It is impossible to predict how long this process will take. But we can be sure that it will be more than thirty of forty years, and probably more than a hundred years.