Additions to the Draft of the Central Committee’s Comment on Bo Yibo’s Preliminary Summary Report on the Inspection of Violations of Financial Discipline (July 27, 1952)

(2) We approve Comrade Bo Yibo, Chairman of the Central Savings Inspection Commission, for his preliminary summary report dated July 26 concerning the inspection of violations of financial discipline [1], and hereby transmit this report to you. The Central Committee has instructed the Central Savings Inspection Commission to carry out another inspection in September to ascertain whether all fiscal and logistical departments at various levels required to submit self-criticisms have indeed completed and submitted them.

(3) This document and its annex [2] should be published in Party publications. Printed from Mao Zedong’s handwritten manuscript.

Notes [1] Bo Yibo’s report states: Since the CPC Central Committee issued on April 24, 1952, an instruction requiring local financial organs and logistical departments to conduct inspections for violations of financial discipline, a total of 286 reports had been received by July 25—44 from local authorities and 242 from the military. The Northwest Region, as well as the major cities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Wuhan, had yet to submit their reports. The report lists the main manifestations of violations of financial discipline found in local financial organs, the army’s logistical system, and various central enterprise departments. It points out that, regardless of the system or the level of the organ, violations of financial discipline are almost universal, and the losses sustained by the state are grave. The primary causes are departmentalism and parochialism; secondly, the erosion of bourgeois ideology, leading to competitive tendencies toward embezzlement and corruption, ostentation, indulgence in pleasure, extravagance and waste, with mutual imitation—those above setting the example for those below—gradually becoming an entrenched practice; and thirdly, bureaucratic practices in work, characterized by the absence of strict, comprehensive regulations and realistic expenditure standards.

[2] This document refers to the CPC Central Committee’s comment of July 27, 1952, forwarding Bo Yibo’s preliminary summary report on the inspection of violations of financial discipline. The present text comprises items two and three thereof. The annex is Bo Yibo’s summary report, submitted to Mao Zedong and the Central Committee on July 26.