Instruction on Circulating Information about Serious Policy Violations in Tax Collection by Shanghai Tax Authorities
(March 27, 1953)

Comrade Bo Yibo[1]:
This document[2] has educational significance. It should be distributed by the Central Ministry of Finance (adding a report header and a few sentences of commentary) to the regional and provincial/municipal finance and economics committees and their finance administrations.
At the same time, it shall be printed and distributed in Beijing as indicated above (Shang Kun is aware of this).
Mao Zedong
March 27

[1] Bo Yibo, then Deputy Director of the Financial and Economic Committee of the Government Administration Council and concurrently Minister of Finance.
[2] Refers to the report dated March 25, 1953, from the Ministry of Finance of the Central People's Government to the East China Finance and Economics Committee and its Finance Administration, and to the Shanghai Municipal Finance and Economics Committee, with a copy to Mao Zedong, regarding serious policy violations in tax collection by Shanghai tax authorities. The report stated that under the leadership and supervision of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and Finance and Economics Committee, the Shanghai Tax Bureau diligently fulfilled the previous year's tax collection tasks and that its work yielded results. However, because the leading bodies of the finance departments harbored the notion of stressing tasks over policies, placing greater emphasis on tasks while providing insufficient policy guidance to the tax bureau, a segment of personnel—not only among ordinary tax cadres but also within the leading cadres at various levels of the tax bureau—created an opposition between tasks and policies and entertained the idea that tasks could be accomplished without regard for policies. Recently, the fourth issue of Party Newspaper Correspondence reported that certain branch offices of the Shanghai Tax Bureau exhibited serious policy violations. Some coerced private merchants into prepaying business tax and commodity tax; some even levied taxes on goods that should not have been taxed; some, in their eagerness to press for tax payments, even resorted to detaining persons, suspending persons, and conducting sequential interrogations, among other serious instances of unlawful and disciplinary violations. Leading cadres at the Shanghai Tax Bureau failed to correct these acts upon discovering them.