Letter to Hu Qiaomu1
(December 20, 1943)
Qiaomu:
Please collect for me the histories of social development from the historical
materialist point of view that you can find in Yan’an, whether translated or
original. I heard that a certain Soviet author wrote a novel about how monkeys
changed into human beings.2 I once read a book on sociology by Raevsky;3 Zhang
Bojian4 also translated a book titled A Brief History of Social Evolution (or he
could have written it). Books like these—please collect them all for me.
Mao Zedong
Notes
Our source for this document is Mao Zedong shuxin xuanji, pp. 217–18, where it is reproduced from the
manuscript.
1. Hu Qiaomu was Mao Zedong’s main secretary at this time; for details, see above, note to the text of
January 23, 1942.
2. Referring to How Man Became a Giant, by Soviet science fiction writer Mikhail Ilyin and his wife, Elena
Segal.
3. Referring to Weiwu de shehuixue (Materialistic Sociology), by Raevsky and translated into Chinese by
Lu Yiyuan. It was published by Xin Yuzhou Bookstore in Shanghai in August 1929.
4. Zhang Bojian (1898–1926) was an early member of the Chinese Communist Party. He compiled Shehui

jinhua jianshi (A Brief History of Social Evolution), published by Guoguang Bookstore in November 1925.