Instructions of the Central Committee on Forwarding the Beijing Municipal Party Committee’s Report on Launching the Anti-Corruption Campaign (December 4, 1951) To all departments of the Central Committee and the Military Commission, to the Party Groups of the Central People’s Government; to all Central Bureaus; and please promptly forward this to your subordinate sub-bureaus, provincial committees, municipal committees, district party committees, prefectural party committees, and county party committees; to the party committees of the major military regions and to the Volunteer Army party committee, with instructions to immediately circulate it to all political, military, and logistics departments under your jurisdiction down to the regimental level:  (1) The Central Committee has approved the report submitted by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee in the morning of December 4, 1951, concerning corruption among staff members in Beijing and its proposals for launching a future anti-corruption campaign [1], deeming the report entirely correct.  (2) You are hereby instructed, upon receipt of these instructions, to carry out, within three weeks at most and no later than one month, a planned preliminary inspection of instances of corruption among the staff of your own unit and of all subordinate units at the next lower level. Following the various measures outlined by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, you are to mobilize the broadest possible masses both inside and outside the Party—including members of the democratic parties and non-Party democrats—to conduct a vigorous, resolute, and high-profile investigation and punishment of corrupt officials.  (3) You are also directed to prepare, broadly following the format of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee’s report, a first report to the Central Committee on the inspection and punishment of corrupt officials within one month of receiving these instructions. All departments of the Central Committee and the Military Commission shall submit their reports separately to the Central Committee and the Military Commission; all Party Groups of the Central People’s Government, all Central Bureaus, sub-bureaus, provincial committees, municipal committees, district party committees, prefectural party committees, and county party committees shall submit their reports hierarchically to the Central Committee and their respective higher authorities. Reports from county-level committees and above,

in addition to being sent to their immediate superiors, must also be transmitted directly to the Central Committee. Where telegraph facilities are available, reports should be sent by telegraph; where such facilities do not exist, they should be mailed through the post office. Reports from the second- and third-level military regions in the military system, apart from being forwarded to their superiors, must also be sent directly to the Military Commission. Reports from units below the military region level are to be collected by the military region and then relayed to the Military Commission. Reports from all organs of the Volunteer Army are to be gathered by the Volunteer Army Party Committee and forwarded to the Military Commission. Anyone who fails to submit a report will be regarded as having violated discipline. Those who delay submitting their reports must provide a justifiable reason.  (4) These instructions and the Beijing Municipal Party Committee’s report must be made available for study by Party members holding positions at or above section chief level, and they are to be published in Party periodicals. Printed by the Central Committee at 8:00 p.m. on December 4, 1951, based on Mao Zedong’s manuscript. Notes [1] In its report, the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee stated that it had decided to launch a large-scale, widespread campaign to encourage denunciations from the bottom up, involving both Party members and non-Party elements, to complement top-down inspections and thereby initiate a citywide anti-corruption drive. The specific measures include: first, requiring heads of all units to conduct thorough top-down inspections to expose corrupt individuals; second, calling on corrupt officials to confess voluntarily; third, urging and mobilizing all Communist Party members, Young Communist League members, trade union members, and people from all social strata to report corrupt activities; and fourth, assigning reliable cadres to form inspection teams responsible for conducting mutual checks within each unit as well as between superior, subordinate, and peer organizations.