A Letter to Zhou Enlai and Other Comrades

Date: 1957-03-17
Source: Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward
        (Harvard University Press, 1989), ed. Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, Eugene Wu

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A Letter to Zhou Enlai and Other Comrades
17 MARCH 1957
[256]
Comrades [Zhou] Enlai, XX, XX, XX!
Universities [and] middle schools should all be required to strengthen ideological [and] political leadership and improve ideological
[and] political education. [Academic] classes should be reduced;
middle school political classes should be restored, [and] constitutional [law] classes canceled; ideology [and] politics textbooks should
be edited afresh; groups of cadres from [both] the party and govern-

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Sources: 1:256; alternate text, 6A:48. See also Text 10, Mao's speech at Tianjin given the same
day.
‘The excised characters may be given names of Deng Xiaoping, party General Secretary; Lu
2/4 TEXT NINE
ment systems capable and suited for school work should be transferred to work in universities and middle schools; the responsibility
of leading ideological [and] political work shall be vested in the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Education. Please
[have] the Center discuss the above-mentioned points [and] issue a
decision. I have already reached Tianjin.
Mao Zedong
17 March 1957
Dingyi director of CC Propaganda Department; and Hu Qiaomu, an alternate member of
the party secretariat dealing with ideology. Or Mao may have been addressing Premier
Zhou and his ministers responsible for education, Zhang Xiruo (Education) and Yang Xiufeng (Higher Education).