Letter to Hu Qiaomu[1]

(May 24, 1950)

Comrade Qiaomu:

The Party-wide rectification movement is about to begin. This matter has already become the central link in pushing forward all current work. If this link is not resolved, all work cannot be smoothly pushed forward.

The Central Committee has designated a three-person committee, with you as the director, responsible for reviewing rectification documents and telegrams from various localities and drafting reply telegrams; thereafter, responsible for following the development of this movement, drafting guiding documents and telegrams for the Central Committee, and paying attention to the reporting and guidance in newspapers and periodicals (an editorial should be written in the first ten days of June). All local rectification directive documents must be reviewed by the Central Committee. As of today, those that have arrived include those from East China, Southwest, Northwest, Inner Mongolia, and the First Field Army, etc. Please review them all within two or three days, invite An Ziwen[2] and Xiao Hua to discuss them, and draft reply telegrams one by one (please ask Shangkun[3] to pay attention to all such incoming telegrams from various localities and copy them to you and An and Xiao), or perhaps a general reply telegram is also needed. The principle is to grant approval to those that are generally usable, and to make revisions to those that require partial modification. Regarding study documents, those that concern the whole country must be unified. The reply telegrams must be fast. Within this month (only seven days left), all matters including drafting, sending to the comrades of the Secretariat for review, and dispatching by 4A-level telegram must be completed, so that the nationwide rectification can begin uniformly in the first ten days of June.

Mao Zedong
May 24, 6 a.m.

[1] Hu Qiaomu, then served as Mao Zedong's secretary and Vice Minister of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
[2] An Ziwen, then served as Vice Minister of the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Xiao Hua, then served as Deputy Director of the General Political Department of the People's Revolutionary Military Council.
[3] Shangkun, namely Yang Shangkun, then served as Director of the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.