Commentary on the Experience of Suppressing Counterrevolutionaries in Wanquan County, Chahar Province (May 15, 1951)

To all Central Bureaus, with instructions to forward immediately to Branch Bureaus, Provincial Committees, Regional Party Committees, Municipal Committees of large and medium-sized cities, and Prefectural Committees; and further, all Prefectural Committees are requested to transmit this document down through the ranks to County Committees and Municipal Committees in smaller cities:  We hereby circulate the experience of Wanquan County [1] for your information. Please follow its example in carrying out similar work.

How is the suppression of counterrevolutionaries being conducted in counties and cities throughout the country? Has extensive publicity been launched among the masses? Have mass denunciation meetings been held? What has been the public response? Each Secretary of a County Committee and each Secretary of a Municipal Committee (except those already having submitted reports) should write me a report and submit it to their respective Prefectural Committee or Provincial Committee for onward transmission. I hope that the secretaries of all more than two thousand county and municipal committees across the country will communicate directly with me at least once.

After all such communications have been collected, we shall issue a circular bulletin, in which the most successful experiences, like that of Wanquan County, will be forwarded to various localities for reference.

Mao Zedong, May 15th. Printed from the manuscript.

Note [1]: The experience of Wanquan County in vigorously suppressing counterrevolutionaries, as reported in a circular issued by the General Office of the CPC Chahar Provincial Committee on May 5, 1951, was as follows: Fourteen death-row convicts were executed separately in four locations—the town proper, Taishizhuang in District Five, Xihongmiao in District One, and Jiubao in District Four—while joint village-wide mass denunciation meetings were convened to galvanize the populace in the campaign against counterrevolutionaries. Over twenty thousand people attended these meetings in the four locations, and public sentiment was extremely high.