The first half of 1958 was a period of constant travel and consecutive conferences for the CCP leadership. In his speeches during this period, Mao repeatedly returned to the topic of dogmatism. He emphasized the necessity to overcome slavish respect for the Soviet model and “experts” in general. Instead of placing supreme attention on the cultivation of heavy industry that had shaped the Chinese understanding of economic development in the early years of the People’s Republic, policies were shifted in the direction of agricultural collectivization. By means of instigating a “Great Leap Forward,” China was to skip the period of socialism (and capitalism) made possible through the “emancipation of thinking and the destruction of superstition” (jiefang sixiang, pochu mixin), one of the most prominent slogans of the Great Leap Forward. The destruction of superstition was to be made possible through the cultivation of a worship of “truth,” the nearest approximation of which was defined as Mao Zedong Thought. As this chapter is to show, Mao during the Great Leap postulated a dialectical relationship between leader cults and intellectual emancipation, a distinction that was to give rise to the first public expounding of his cult since the Yan’an days.