Letter to Nan Hanchen About Drafting
the Report on Economic and Financial
Problems
(December 20, 1942)
Comrade Hanchen,1
I wonder whether you have started writing the materials that I requested.2 I
asked for materials in the four areas of grain and fodder, taxation, banking, and
finance, with each section focusing on government policies and work in each
area, addressed to the masses of cadres so that they can understand the
direction of policy and methods of work.3 In discussing government policy and
work, erroneous opinions and shortcomings in work should be criticized to
arouse their vigilance. Each section should provide some history and some
analysis, as well as ways to proceed in 1943. Please put real effort into this in the
four days from today to Thursday and hand them to me on Friday, or you may
also first give me the materials on grain and fodder on Tuesday or Wednesday
and the rest on Thursday and Friday. Please consult people in the banking and
trade bureaus for the two sections on banking and trade, but you are familiar
with grain and taxation yourself. Your previous reports were excellent, except
that they were addressed to a small number of people instead of speaking to the
masses of cadres, and therefore they should be rewritten.
Salutations!
Mao Zedong
December 20 at night

I have used the section you wrote on bedding and clothing in the discussion of
industrial questions.4
Notes
Our source for this text is Mao Zedong shuxin xuanji, pp. 209–10, which is based on a printed copy of the
manuscript.
1. For Nan Hanchen, see above, note to the text of December 13, 1942.
2. See above, Mao’s letter to Nan, December 13, 1942.
3. This phrase is underscored by Mao in the Mao Zedong shuxin xuanji, p. 209.
4. Mao used materials from Nan’s earlier report on bedding and clothing in section 7, “On the
Development of Self-Supporting Industry,” of his “Economic and Financial Problems,” of December 1942. See
below, text of December 1942.