Fundamentals of Political Economy, also known as the Shanghai Textbook, was originally published as part of the Youth Self-Education series, a book series intended to help the revolutionary youth cultivate their skills in the three component parts of Marxism: philosophy, political economy, and scientific socialism. It was published during the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and was explicit in its purpose as a weapon in the fight against revisionism and opportunism. As it says in the first chapter, without a strong foundation in political economy, we cannot fully understand, analyze and combat deviations from the red line and their proponents, such as Lin Biao and Liu Shaoqi at the time of this book's release.

Note on Chinese pronunciation: Chinese words and names in this text are rendered in the Wade–Giles system of romanization. This system is today considered quite outdated, and its odd and seemingly arbitrary rendering of Chinese has led to many mispronunciations from foreign speakers. I have done my best to find the readings for these words in pinyin, the far superior system of Chinese romanization, and they will be pronounced that way, if not with the correct tones. To give some examples, you will hear: Mao Zedong, not Mao Tsetung; Beijing, not Peking; Hebei, not Hopei; Xinjiang, not Sinkiang; Zhang Chunqiao, not Chang Chun-chiao. I also take the liberty of replacing Canton with the Chinese Guangzhou. However, I do not pronounce Chiang Kai-shek as Jiang Jieshi, figuring that the latter would be unfamiliar to most listeners and would cause confusion.

This is the 1977 M.E. Sharpe publication of the text, with an introduction by George C. Wang. A free version of this text can be read on Banned Thought or at the link below:
www.bannedthought.net/China/MaoEra/PoliticalEconomy/FundamentalsOfPoliticalEconomy-Shanghai-1974-English-OCR-SinglePage.pdf

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