Endorsement of the Report on the Enlarged Meeting Discussing the Question of Suppressing Counterrevolutionaries
(March 27, 1951)

To all Central Bureaus, and forward to Sub-bureaus, Provincial Party Committees, District Party Committees, and Party Committees of Large and Medium-sized Municipalities:

The method adopted by Beijing[1] is very good. Please act accordingly in all cases. Write reports on how you have done so.

Mao Zedong
March 27

[1] Refers to the practice described in the report submitted by the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to the Central Committee and the North China Bureau on March 20, 1951, concerning the convening of an enlarged meeting of the Municipal Consultative Committee to discuss the question of suppressing counterrevolutionaries. The report stated that adopting small-scale representative meetings with the participation of representatives from various circles to discuss the suppression of counterrevolutionaries was intended to facilitate focused discussion, enable representatives of the people from all circles to understand the true situation and obtain ample opportunity to speak, and arouse their hatred toward counterrevolutionaries. The meeting’s reports should emphasize enumerating the crimes of counterrevolutionary criminals, concentrating on reporting typical case files and the facts concerning typical criminals. In this way, although less reasoning is expounded, the reports possess indisputable persuasive power. Exhibiting and displaying the criminal evidence of counterrevolutionary criminals at the meeting also yielded very good results.