To all Central Bureaus, and forward to sub-bureaus, provincial, municipal, and district Party committees, prefectural Party committees, and county Party committees: Comrade He Cheng’s report [1] is very good. Upon receipt, you may publish it in internal Party publications to draw the attention of leading comrades at all levels.

The Central Committee holds that the lack of attention paid by Party committees at all levels to health, epidemic prevention, and general medical work constitutes a major shortcoming in the Party’s work and must be corrected.

Henceforth, health, epidemic prevention, and general medical work must be regarded as a major political task, and every effort must be made to develop this work.

Health workers must be given leadership and assistance.

Health work must be inspected in a timely manner.

With regard to funding, in addition to what is listed in the central budget, every possible effort should be made to raise funds at the local level.

Cadres must be educated to understand that, under present conditions, the annual losses in human labor, animal power, and economic terms suffered by the people nationwide due to illness and death caused by a lack of health knowledge and health work may exceed the annual losses suffered by the people nationwide from various calamities such as floods, droughts, windstorms, and insect pests. Therefore, health work must at least be regarded as equal in importance to disaster relief and prevention work, and must absolutely not be slighted.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
September 9, 1951
Printed based on Mao Zedong’s manuscript.

Note
[1] Refers to the report on nationwide epidemic prevention work submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on September 7, 1951, by Comrade He Cheng, Secretary of the Party Leadership Group and Vice Minister of the Central People’s Government Ministry of Health. The report summarized the achievements made in health work since the founding of New China by following the three principles of “facing the workers, peasants, and soldiers; putting prevention first; and uniting Chinese and Western medicine,” as well as the shortcomings still existing in the work. It proposed that for epidemic prevention work to achieve its due results, leading comrades in Party and government at all levels must give it appropriate attention. However, many Party and government leading cadres below the provincial and county levels only regard preventing people from starving to death as the government’s responsibility, while paying insufficient attention to deaths from illness due to unsanitary conditions, considering them an unavoidable “natural calamity.” In reality, the number of people who die from epidemic diseases far exceeds the number who starve to death, and most of these deaths are preventable.