To Lin Boqu
(June 13 and 15, 1941)

Venerable Lin:

I have gone over the budget and the final accounting of income and expenditures
and am hereby returning them to you.
Please let me know about such matters as they arise in the future. Although I
can hardly relieve you of your cares and responsibilities, with regard to adjustments in personnel I can be of some small assistance to you.
What we talked about today was overall orientation and personnel policies and,
thanks to your approval, we will certainly be able to put them into effect in the
future.
I would like to call your attention to two more things:
1. Give approval to all expenditures that are absolutely unavoidable,¹ allowing the recipient all that is asked for. If he is to collapse eventually, let him collapse (actually this will not happen), but at this point do not haggle over every
penny with him. The principle is in the words "absolutely unavoidable." Included
within this principle is the idea of fostering the weak and the small.
2. Take on everything, whether it belongs to the Center, the army, or the locality, and make an overall plan. The army is not to be divided into a national army
and local armies (no such designation is to be made), and all are to be included in
the overall plan. The military was not included in the budget this time; please add
it on in the future. We also request that you consider and decide whether or not
what we have said is appropriate.
This is also for the venerable Xie.²

Mao Zedong, night of June 13

All in all, the line for development is entirely correct.

Our source for this letter is Mao Zedong shuxin xuanji, pp. 170–72, where it is reproduced
from Mao's handwritten manuscript.
P.S. 1. Additional expenses will be unavoidable, because it is impossible to plan
everything beforehand. For example, no one could have predicted the expenses
for Jiefang ribao before it was decided to publish the paper. Therefore, the only
solution is to increase the general reserve fund in the budget, and then make
allocations afterward according to need (that which is absolutely unavoidable).
2. There is no need to fix the maintenance of the border region currency at 10
million; it would be best to figure on 15 million, which is less constraining.
3. The part that is raised independently should be indicated in the budget. For
example, of the monthly expenditure of Kang Sheng's office,³ which is 57,000
yuan, only 12,000 yuan will be allocated, and they will raise 45,000 yuan on their
own; this figure should also be entered. Roughly speaking, public funding comprises one-third, and the remaining two-thirds is to be raised independently. It
does not accord with reality to leave this sort of thing out of the budget. Therefore
it is necessary to be in close touch with the actual state of affairs in each part of the
Party, the government, and the army, and become familiar with their situations,
before calculations can be made especially the army.
4. It is not a good idea to persist in the theory of the proportionality of the
circulation of commodities and money, as many new conditions should be taken
into account and need to be studied at a later date. If we insist on it too strongly and
it turns out to be inaccurate, our reputation will suffer. The above points are simply what comes to mind, and I have written them down for your consideration.

Mao Zedong
on June 15th

--- Notes

1. As in the case of other letters, the words set in boldface were underscored by Mao in
his handwritten manuscript.

2. Xie Juezai (1884-1971) was then deputy secretary of the Northwest Bureau of the
Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, secretary of the Party and the League
of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region government, and general secretary of the
Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region government.


3. This refers to the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee's Social Department,
of which Kang Sheng (1898-1975) was the head at the time. Kang, who was also the head
of the Intelligence Department, would play a key role in the Rectification Campaign of
1942.