Letter to Comrade Kang Sheng
(January 12, 1962)

Comrade Kang Sheng:

Your kind letter of the 8th has been received, and it gave me great pleasure. Please tell Comrade Guo Moruo that his matching poem is very good. He need not “smite the priest a thousand times in place of the Tang monk’s flesh” anymore; he has adopted a united front policy towards the middle-of-the-road faction, and that is excellent.

I am sending you a recent poem of mine, “Ode to the Plum Blossom,”[4] which is directed against revisionism. Please read it. I also request that you pass it on to Moruo for his perusal. Enclosed is a “Ode to the Plum Blossom” by Lu You. The explanatory note at the end was written by me; I think that is how it should be understood. Yet precisely what year this poem was written and what its theme is still await textual research. I have merely taken the words at face value and said a few things.

Please convey my greetings to the venerable Guo!

Mao Zedong
January 12, 1962