Forwarded Comment on Comrade Hu Qiaomu’s[I] Letter of Investigation from Hunan[2]
(9 May 1961)

Comrade Hu Qiaomu’s letter is hereby distributed to all Central Bureaus and the Party committees of all provinces, municipalities, and regions for reference.

Mao Zedong
9 May 1961, 3:00 a.m., in Shanghai.

--- Notes

[I] Hu Qiaomu, then alternate secretary of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee and secretary to Mao Zedong.
[2] Refers to Hu Qiaomu’s letter to Mao Zedong dated 8 May 1961. The letter states: Our investigation group, together with the Hunan Provincial Party Committee, has recently put forward preliminary suggestions for revising the Sixty Articles on Agriculture and plans to conduct further investigations into commercial and handicraft issues, about which we previously had little understanding. The recent investigation findings are briefly reported as follows: 1. The issue of mess halls. The number of mess halls in the Shaoshan Commune has dropped from the original 112 to 6, of which 5 will cease operation shortly, and the remaining one, which does not allocate private plots or engage in household sideline production, will probably find it difficult to sustain itself. The enthusiastic response of the masses to the basic resolution of the commune-wide mess hall issue within a mere three days is hard to imagine; some even called it a “second liberation.” The Hunan Provincial Party Committee is highly determined to resolve the mess hall issue and expects to do so across the entire province in the near future. 2. The issue of rural commerce. The provincial Party committee has decided to make the original five communes in Shaoshan pilot sites for establishing supply and marketing cooperatives. Although the staff of the former supply and marketing departments were shaken by the shift from state cadres to collective cadres, they markedly changed their attitude toward commune member customers and immediately went to various production teams to solicit opinions. The Shaoshan Supply and Marketing Cooperative will soon be established, under the leadership of the commune, with independent accounting. 3. The issue of rural handicrafts. In order to mobilize the initiative of handicraft workers and restore market supply, the Central-South Bureau and all provincial Party committees have decided to restore handicraft production cooperatives. We suggest that each province may carry out some pilot work. 4. The issue of urban residents’ mess halls. Our investigation in Xiangtan City found that participation in such mess halls is in fact compulsory, and the severity of the problem is no less than in the countryside. The Xiangtan Municipal Party Committee has written a special report on this issue, and the provincial Party committee is preparing to resolve it swiftly in the near future. 5. The issue of state-owned factories and enterprises participating in and leading urban people’s communes. Doing so would inevitably increase personnel, disperse energy, and pose real difficulties, and would often bring adverse consequences to production in nearby rural areas. 6. While in Changsha, we also incidentally inquired about the situation of urban industrial and commercial investigations and urban rectification. There are indeed many major issues of guiding principles and policies in this area that urgently require resolution. This calls for specialized, in-depth investigation.