Speaking on the question of the intellectuals in 1957, Mao Zedong repeatedly used the idiom, ``With the skin gone, to what can the hair attach itself?'' derived from the section entitled ``The Fourteenth Year of Duke Xigong'' in the classical work Zuo Zhuan. He used it metaphorically to indicate that, with the basic completion of the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production, the ``skin'' (meaning the economic base of old China, to which the intellectuals educated in pre-Liberation years attached themselves) was gone, and that now these intellectuals (``the hair'') had no alternative but to attach themselves to the new ``skin'' of public ownership, i.e., to the proletariat.