On the Approval for Large-Scale Reduction and Exemption of Public Grain and Agricultural Tax in the Southwest Disaster Areas
(May 5, 1953)

Comrade Bo Yibo:
In those places mentioned in the report, we should boldly reduce and exempt on a large scale, without any further hesitation.

Mao Zedong
May 5

[1]
This approval was written on a report forwarded by the Political and Legal Affairs Leading Party Group of the Central Committee, originally submitted by Wang Yifu, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Central People’s Government, on April 25, 1953, regarding the disaster situation in the Southwest and certain issues in public grain collection. The report was addressed to Xie Juezai and copied to the Political and Legal Affairs Leading Party Group and Peng Zhen. The report stated that the main causes of the famine in the Southwest, apart from the backward production and meager incomes in impoverished mountainous areas, included the problem of agricultural tax collection exceeding the people’s capacity to bear the burden. Many cadres generally held the mindset of overfulfilling collection tasks, failing to grant reductions or exemptions where they were due, and sometimes deliberately inflating output assessments, leading to excessive levies.

The current situation in the mountainous areas of the Southwest is as follows: on the one hand, the government holds large quantities of old grain and “dead-end grain” that cannot be utilized; on the other hand, many disaster victims in the mountains lack food and need relief, causing great public discontent. The report proposed the following solutions to address this issue:
(1) Public grain collection in mountainous areas should be reduced, the threshold for agricultural tax collection should be raised, and excessively collected public grain should be returned.
(2) Old grain and “dead-end grain” in storage should be loaned interest-free to disaster victims in nearby areas to alleviate their food shortages; local specialty products that can be marketed should be purchased, using old grain and “dead-end grain” as procurement funds; and “dead-end grain” should be used locally for work-relief programs to carry out farmland, water conservancy, and transportation construction projects.

[2]
Bo Yibo, then Deputy Director of the Financial and Economic Committee of the Government Administration Council and Minister of Finance.