Letter to the Committee for Common
People's Education

(May 26, 1924)

Comrades of the Committee for Common People's Education:

Because my mental ailment has been daily growing worse, and because of the
burden of work in the Organization Department and the Secretariat, it is truly
difficult for me to acquit myself of my duties as a member of the Standing
Committee of the Committee for Common People's Education.1 I beg you to
accept my resignation, and to appoint another person in my place. I have asked
Comrade Liu Bolun to deputize for me at the meeting of the Standing Committee
to be held today.

Mao Zedong

The source for this letter is a copy of the Chinese text made in the late 1960s by a scholar
who prefers to remain anonymous. The original in Mao's hand was located at that time in
the Guomindang archives.
1. By "mental ailment" [naobing] (a term which he also used in the letter of February
14, 1926, translated below), Mao presumably meant simply that he was under great strain.
He did indeed have a crushing workload. At the first meeting of the Shanghai Executive
Bureau of the Guomindang, which took place on February 25, 1924, the day before he
wrote this letter, Mao had been appointed secretary of the bureau's Organization Department and acting head of the documents section of the Secretariat, in which capacity he had
kept the minutes of the meeting. In addition to these new responsibilities in the
Guomindang, he had been, since the Third Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in
1923, secretary of the Central Bureau and head of the Organization Department of that
party. Mao Zedong had been involved in education for the masses since his school days.
(See the materials of 1917 regarding a workers' night school translated in Volume I of this
edition, pp. 143-56.) In 1922 he had organized a movement for common people's education (pingmin jiaoyu, also translated as mass education or popular education) in Hunan,
which served as cover for making contact with labor circles in Anyuan and elsewhere. (On
this, see Li Jui, Early Mao, pp. 185-88.) The committee from which he resigned on this
occasion was one set up by the Shanghai Executive Bureau of the Guomindang at its
second meeting on March 6, 1924.