Comments on a Speech Delivered at a Study and Discussion Meeting on Documents
(December 25, 1952)
To Comrades Zhou, Deng, Chen, Bo, and Zeng Shan: Please read. To Comrade Gao Gang:
This document contains one very good sentence that immediately makes it clear where the problems lie in our commercial work.
I wonder whether the outcome of the recent meeting of the Ministry of Commerce is consistent with what Comrade Gao Gang has set forth in this document. I would appreciate it if Comrade Zeng Shan could inform me accordingly.
Mao Zedong
December 25, 1952
[I]
Zeng Shan was then Minister of the Ministry of Commerce of the Central People’s Government.
[2]
This refers to a speech submitted by Gao Gang, which he had delivered at a discussion meeting held while studying Malenkov’s report to the Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In his remarks, Gao Gang, drawing on the three issues raised in Malenkov’s report—namely, insufficient study of consumer needs, poor service attitudes, and inadequate management—analyzed the actual situation of China’s commercial sector and put forward three proposals for improving the operation and management of trade enterprises and enhancing economic accounting:
(1) Thoroughly study consumer needs and strengthen the planning of production, transportation, sales, and commodity distribution; (2) Clarify the assets and accounts of trade enterprises, determine the capital requirements of companies at all levels, and establish certain key norms and quotas; (3) Intensify political work, cultivate and commend model workers, and institute a system of bonuses for overfulfillment, thereby improving the service attitude of commercial personnel. It was later discovered that the speech submitted by Gao Gang was in fact merely an outline of remarks on commercial work prepared by Liu Mingfu, then Director of the Trade and Cooperative Bureau of the State Planning Commission.