Comment on Wang Ming’s Letter [1]
(August 18, 1950)

Liu, Zhou, Zhu, Ren, Shangkun 121 read.
Wang Ming’s statement should be written before the opening of the Fourth Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee in early November and submitted to the Political Bureau. As for Wang Ming’s notebooks and newspapers from the Wuhan period, ask Shangkun to check whether they are still preserved. The above two points,
to be conveyed orally by Shangkun to Wang Ming.

Mao Zedong
August 18

[1]
Wang Ming, i.e., Chen Shaoyu, was then a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and chairman of the Legal Affairs Committee of the Central People’s Government. On August 17, 1950, he wrote to Mao Zedong and the Secretariat of the Central Committee, requesting that the Central Committee clearly specify the time limit within which he should produce a statement reviewing the various articles, pamphlets, and other documents he had written during the ten-year civil war period and the War of Resistance Against Japan; and requesting that, for the purpose of this review, the notebooks taken back at the end of the December 1937 meeting be returned to him, and that he be allowed to borrow the Xinhua Daily from the Wuhan period and the New China Daily from the Yan’an period.

[2]
Liu refers to Liu Shaoqi. Zhou refers to Zhou Enlai. Zhu refers to Zhu De. Ren refers to Ren Bishi. Shangkun refers to Yang Shangkun, then director of the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.