October 10, 1952

[Source: Selections from Mao Zedong's Letters, p.449.]


Vice-Chairman Song:[1]

I am extremely elated by your gift of your masterpiece Wei xin Zhongguo
fendou (Struggle for New China), and would like hereby to express my
deep gratitude. Your other gifts have also been received and I thank you
equally for them.

I wish you healthy and well-being.


Mao Zedong

October 10
NOTES

1. Song Qingling (b.1892) was one of the most prominent
women in China's modern and recent history. Born into a family that acquired
very considerable wealth and influence, she married Sun Yat-sen in 1914.
For the next ten years she was also Sun's confidant in political matters,
collaborating with him as a private secretary as well as wife and assistant.
After Sun's death, Song Qingling's parting of ways with the rest of her own
family came in 1927 when her youngest sister, Meiling married Chiang Kai-shek.
Earlier in that year, she had parted ways with the mainstream of the KMT,
which Sun had founded — i.e. with both the
Nanjing government and the Wuhan government
— for its anti-Communist policies and purges.
In 1948 she became honorary chairman of an anti-Chiang KMT splinter group,
the KMT Revolutionary Committee. This organisation remained active in the
PRC after 1949 as one of the "democratic parties".

Transcription by the Maoist Documentation Project.