Comments by the Staff
(December 14, 1963)
Comrades Shaoqi, Xiaoping, and Peng Zhen III:
Please take a look at this document dated December 12.[1] It raises a question worthy of attention: Should a political commissar, or a political instructor, or even a propaganda officer, be appointed in each production team—someone from the ranks of the semi-literate intelligentsia who does not leave agricultural work (there are plenty of graduates of higher primary schools; junior high school graduates can also be found)—to carry out ideological and political work among hundreds of millions of rural residents? A similar model could be adopted in urban industry, commerce, and among the general populace, establishing political departments, political offices, and political instructors from top to bottom, just as in the military.
[!)
“Shaoqi” refers to Liu Shaoqi. “Xiaoping” refers to Deng Xiaoping, who at that time served as General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council. “Peng Zhen” was then a member of the CPC Central Political Bureau and a secretary of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee.
[2)
This refers to the article “Strengthening Ideological and Political Work in the Countryside,” published in the eighty-third issue of “Mass Feedback,” compiled and printed by the Secretariat Office of the CPC Central Committee on December 13, 1963. The article is an abstract of a letter sent in November by Fu Jinsheng of the Propaganda Department of the Beian County Party Committee in Heilongjiang Province. The letter notes that although instructions on ideological and political work in the countryside are usually issued from above, they often fail to reach the grassroots level. The reasons why such work cannot be effectively implemented at the production-team level are as follows: (1) The underlying ideological understanding has not yet been thoroughly resolved; (2) Certain organizational structures at higher levels are improperly set up, preventing some functional departments from fulfilling their proper roles while simultaneously drawing the principal leaders of the local Party organizations into administrative affairs from which they cannot extricate themselves; (3) Production teams lack a dedicated cadre for ideological and political work.
Therefore, it is recommended:
(1) To abolish overlapping institutions where Party and government functions are indistinguishable, such as production offices.
(2)
Each production team should, like a company in the military, be assigned a political commissar specifically responsible for ideological and political work and Party affairs within the team.

Let the Secretariat discuss this matter, and then submit it to the Standing Committee for further deliberation.
In 1963, Mao Zedong reviewed documents in the courtyard of the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai.
Mao Zedong
December 14th

In 1963, Mao Zedong was at the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai.