(May 14, 1957)
Comrades Shaoqi, Enlai, Chen Yun, Xiaoping, and Peng Zhen⑵, please read. This entire page is worth a careful look; without rectification, our Party will be ruined.
Mao Zedong
May 14
I urge you to pay close attention to the Shanghai Liberation Daily, the Nanjing Xinhua Daily, the Shanghai Wenhui Daily, the Beijing Daily, and the Guangming Daily, focusing particularly on reports concerning contradictions among the people and on our Party’s rectification campaign. This is the most important matter in the world.
[1] This note was written on the second page of the Shanghai Liberation Daily on May 10, 1957. On May 8, 1957, the Liberation Daily invited 22 primary and secondary school teachers to a symposium to discuss the various problems they encountered in their work. On May 10, the newspaper’s second page carried, under the headline “Boldly Expose Contradictions to Aid the Party’s Rectification Campaign,” a full-page summary of the symposium’s proceedings.
Chen Yun was then Vice Chairman of the CPC Central Committee. Xiaoping refers to Deng Xiaoping, who at that time served as General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee. Peng Zhen was then a member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee.